The Effect of Using Blogs to Enhance the Writing Skill of English Language Learners at a Saudi University

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the use of web blogs as a supplementary tool for teaching English. It focuses on studying the effectiveness of using blog exchanges for enhancing the Saudi female university students’ English writing, especially the vocabulary usage. The participants of the current study were thirty-seven Saudi female preparatory year students from the English Language Institute (ELI) at King Abdulaziz University (KAU). Their ages ranged between 18 to 20 years of age. All participants were studying level 103 of the Oxford Headway Plus curriculum, at the third quarter of the academic year 2015-2016. The study hypothesized that there is a positive impact of using web blogs as a supplementary tool in improving the students’ writing skill, especially the use of vocabulary. This research reports on an experimental design study using a quantitative approach. The study also used blog entries and pre/post-tests as primary data collection methods. The pre-test and post-test consisted of 50 vocabulary scale test items. They were taken to measure the differences in participants’ writing performance after 7 weeks of intervention. A paired-sample t-test was utilized for statistical analysis to determine if there were any improvements in the students’ writing performance. The findings indicated an improvement in the students’ writing performance after using the blog entries. In addition, the research experiment contributed to the extension of their vocabulary knowledge.