why do we have to use blog in ELT
Blogs, online personal journals that are frequently updated, have existed in the cyberspace community since 1998. In August of 1999 the release of Blogger, a free blog hosting service, fostered the rapid growth of blog sites (Blood, 2000). Later, blog genre extended into various professional realms especially journalism and business. The cover story of the first issue of Fortune magazine in 2005 introduces “10 tech trends to watch in 2005”, and blog ranks the first one. “According to blog search-engine and measurement firm Technorati”, Fortune reports, “23,000 new weblogs are created every day – or about one every three seconds” (p.34). No wonder the author claims that blogs have become a force that business can’t afford to ignore.
Blogs may be still strange to some English teachers here in Taiwan. What on earth is a blog? According to Webopedia, an online encyclopedia dedicated to computer technology, blog is defined as “Short for Web log, a blog is a Web page that serves as a publicly accessible personal journal for an individual. Typically updated daily, blogs often reflect the personality of the author.” I first found out the free blog construction service of Blogger in the middle of 2003 and immediately created an experimental blog titled “ESL teaching” in my personal website. However, while it was quite convenient to update my ideas about ESL teaching in this blog, I had difficulty adding sidebar links and making my archives function properly. That blog site has hibernated since then. In September 2004, I realized that Blogger also offered Blog*spot URL address as its blog hosting platform. I tried to create another blog hosted on blogger.com and found that it was pretty user-friendly and all the functions worked properly. Because blog features its easy-to-use interface, frequent text update, and interactive comment area, most educators applied their blogs to reading or writing classes (Campbell, 2003; Johnson, 2004; Oravec, 2002; Wilder & Merritt, 2004)
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