The Advantages of Using Vlogs for English Language Learners’ Writing Performance

Abstract

The reputation of vlogging, or video blogging, has considerably enhanced in educational studies in the last 15 years particularly in the wake of Google’s acquisition of YouTube. In fact, besides the increase in accessibility of vlogging, school-related vlogs also alleviate fatigue, help learners build self-confidence with recorded experiences, create interaction and collaboration, which will then bring about language improvements in positive classroom culture. Moving from its profits, this chapter aims at revealing recent pedagogical trends and implementations of vlogs in ESL and EFL contexts over the last decade to identify whether writing practices have been included in research and also present a systematic review. Studies indexed in Scopus or Web of Science (WoS) databases are incorporated. Finally, the review has unveiled that limited amount of research on the use of vlogs has hitherto been operated in the field of English Language Teaching (ELT), and not surprisingly, hardly any of it discusses the writing practices. The researchers seem to draw a sharp line between two productive skills in that they either adopt blogs to investigate learners’ writing competency or prefer vlogs to analyse speeches of the participants. Accordingly, the study offers some suggestions for the integration of vlogs into writing skill and concludes with portraying a potential future agenda.