Students' blog sites

I have just introduced another class of 13 students to the possibilty of improving their English by keeping blog diaries. What really amazed me was how they "took to it like the proverbial ducks to water". Only one of the students in the group had a blog (in Korean), yet the rest of them seemed to understand (almost instinctively) how they worked and their potential.

The students looked at a blog from a previous class, before starting their own. They saw that it is possible to store pictures with commentaries, which is what some of them did in their first entry... I don't even know how to do that! I also noticed that in some cases they were quite happy to express negative emotions. They don't get much of a chance to do this, so I'm pleased that they feel free to do so here.

Here is a list of the webpages from the class.
www.cool79.blogspot.com
www.vanessaliu.blogspot.com
www.cherrisakura.blogspot.com
www.farxiho.blogspot.com
www.specialyac.blogspot.com
www.haofengzhu.blogspot.com
www.michikowada.blogspot.com
www.tomokofeeling.blogspot.com
www.vincenthe.blogspot.com
www.ritalan.blogspot.com
www.plutoking.blogspot.com
www.loloha.blogspot.com
www.mubyaclau.blogspot.com
www.ktoony.blogspot.com

Cautious language

The ability to use cautious language when writing demonstrates that a language student is maturing in his or her ability to manipulate ideas and words with more skill. It is a mark of an inexperienced or lower level student that statements and opinions are expressed in the strongest terms. This lessens the quality and authority of their writing by opening it to challenge from the reader.

In class we analysed a piece of text for evidence of cautious language. The predominant method modifying the strength of a statement is by using modals. There are a number of other language features that can be used for this purpose as well, (such as verb clauses, adjectives/adverbs, and noun phrases). We then did some sentence exercises, which we modified some statements from informal to formal, and from inappropriately strong to more moderate.

I have frequently found that students can complete exercises correctly, but they don't always find it as easy to transfer there knowledge into their own writing, so as an exercise I asked the students to write a paragraph in which they showed that they could use the cautious language that I had taught them in class.

For each nationality I discussed in class the reasons that certain things happened. For my Chinese students I asked them to discuss the reasons why there are now less students coming to NZ to study English than there were a few years ago. For other nationalities we discussed the reasons that there are more students choosing to study English in NZ.

For those of you who might be interested to see the results of this exercise you can click on the links below and read the students ideas.

http://okhranaxp.blogspot.com
http://hehediary.blogspot.com
http://bannsuan.blogspot.com