Lin, M. H., Groom, N., & Lin, C.-Y. (2013). Blog-Assisted Learning in the ESL Writing Classroom: A Phenomenological
Analysis. Educational Technology & Society, 16 (3), 130–139.
Blog-Assisted Learning in the ESL Writing Classroom: A Phenomenological
Analysis
Ming Huei Lin1*, Nicholas Groom2 and Chin-Ying Lin3
1
Department of English, Tamkang University, Taiwan // 2Center for English Language Studies, University of
Birmingham, UK // 3Department of Applied Foreign Languages, Chaoyang University of Technology, Taiwan //
johnlin@mail.tku.edu.tw // n.w.groom@bham.ac.uk // cylin@cyut.edu.tw
*
Corresponding author
(Submitted May 26, 2012; Revised August 08, 2012; Accepted October 08, 2012)
ABSTRACT
This study explores the experiences of a group of Taiwanese ESL student writers on a course of study that used
a blog-assisted language learning (BALL) methodology. Data from in-depth interviews with eight participants
were studied qualitatively using a phenomenological method of analysis. Participants’ blogging activities were
found to be inhibited by low L2 proficiency levels, by feelings of anxiety and embarrassment about possible
peer reactions to their work, and by the slow pace at which completed compulsory blogging tasks were
completed. It is argued that these findings help to explain the observation made in a number of previous studies,
that second language writing students are enthusiastic about BALL in principle, but are not motivated to engage
voluntarily in second language blogging activities in practice. The paper concludes by offering suggestions for
ameliorating the problems identified in our analysis, and by identifying avenues for further research.
Keywords
Classroom blogging, Blog-assisted language learning, ESL writing, Phenomenological analysis
Introduction
Advances in information and communications technologies are now widely regarded as having huge potential for
enhancing the teaching and learning of second language writing (Hyland, 2003; Warschauer, 2010). In recent years,
the focus has begun to shift to Web 2.0 tools in general, and to the pedagogic use of blogs in particular (Campbell,
2003; Ward, 2004; Arani, 2005; Pinkman, 2005; Fellner & Apple, 2006; Warlick, 2007; Richardson, 2009; Wang,
2009; Arslan & Şahin- Kızıl, 2010; Sayed 2010; Sun, 2010; Lin, Lin, & Hsu, 2011; Lin, 2012; Hunter, Muilenburg,
& Burnside, 2012; Nguyen, 2012; Sun, & Chang, 2012). In the field of second language teaching and learning, this
interest has led to the development of a new field of research and practice, which Ward (2004) has termed blogassisted language learning (henceforth BALL). The term BALL is used in different ways by different researchers
and covers a wide variety of implementations in terms of software and course design considerations (cf. Ward, 2004;
Cheng, 2006; Sun, 2010; Lin, 2012). For the purposes of this paper, however, BALL will be understood in general
terms as covering any teaching and learning activities that involve the use of blogs as a computer-mediated platform
(1) where interactions both within and beyond the classroom take place between teachers, students, and even (in
principle, at least) members of the general public, and (2) where language learning activities are observable.
Although a comparatively recent phenomenon, BALL has already generated considerable excitement among second
language writing researchers, teachers and course designers. BALL is seen as holding particular promise for
developing learner autonomy, opening up communication pathways between teachers and students outside the
classroom, and promoting motivation among students learning to write in a second language (Ward, 2004; Fellner &
Apple, 2006; Iida, 2009; Noytim, 2010; Kang, Bonk, & Kim, 2011; Nguyen, 2012; Sun, & Chang, 2012; Taki &
Fardafshari, 2012; Yunus, Salehi, & Chenzi, 2012). Some advocates of BALL have also suggested that these various
advantages may be mutually reinforcing. That is, it has been proposed that students’ motivation levels with regard to
second language writing activities may be boosted by BALL precisely because it uses an exciting form of new
technology that provides them with enhanced opportunities to engage in communication with teachers and peers
(Pinkman, 2005; Kang, Bonk, & Kim, 2011; Trajtemberg & Yiakoumetti, 2011). These higher levels of motivation
may in turn encourage students to engage more frequently - and more voluntarily - in BALL activities, thereby
leading the students’ learning into a virtuous cycle of the kind envisaged in contemporary motivation theory (e.g.,
Dörnyei, 2001; Dörnyei & Ushioda, 2011).
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Though plausible enough in themselves, these optimistic conjectures are not entirely borne out by the findings of the
empirical research that has actually been carried out on BALL to date. While studies have consistently found that
student writers do indeed seem to hold positive beliefs in and attitudes toward BALL (Arani, 2005; Pinkman, 2005;
Cheng, 2006; Sun, 2010; Trajtemberg & Yiakoumetti, 2011; Lin, 2012; Nguyen, 2012), it is equally clear from
recent research that this enthusiasm does not seem to translate into any enhanced desire on the part of students to
engage in blog-assisted writing activities (Chiao, 2006; Wu, 2008; Lin, Lin, & Hsu, 2011). In other words, students
say that they like BALL, but they do not seem to be motivated to engage in any second language blogging activities
unless they are obliged to do so by their teachers (cf. Wu, 2008; Miyazoe & Anderson, 2010). Even starker
illustrations of this lack of take-up can be found in the student blogs conducted in recent studies by Arslan and
Şahin-Kızıl (2010), Trajtemberg and Yiakoumetti (2011), and Lin (2012), which are still live and can thus still be
visited on the Internet. From our own perusal of these websites at the time of writing of this paper (August 2012), it
is clear that the students in these studies did not make any further posts to their own or their peers’ blogs once the
research projects motivating them had finished.
A key question that arises at this point, then, concerns why there is a disjunction between what students say when
invited to evaluate BALL on the one hand, and what they actually do (or more precisely, do not do) when engaged in
this new mode of learning on the other. Why does enthusiasm for BALL in principle fail to translate into blogging as
self-directed language learning activity in practice? In the remainder of this paper we will report on an in-depth
qualitative study that aims to cast light on precisely this question. For this purpose, a leading group of subsidiary
research questions will need to be answered. These questions are as follows:
• What do the participants think about learning by using blogs?
• How do the participants describe their learning attitude and motivation when learning writing through using
blogs?
• How do the participants evaluate the effectiveness of the blogging activities used in these writing lessons?
• Are the participants willing to attend more lessons supported with BALL like this? Why?/Why not?
Methodology
Research setting and participants
The present study was conducted in the Department of Applied Foreign Languages at a university in central Taiwan.
Twenty-five first-year English majors agreed to do a BALL course by signing a consent form. The class met for two
hours each week on Friday mornings, and the course aimed at enabling students to develop well-organized texts in
different types of writing. The curriculum focused on details of language use, mechanics, content and organization,
and related these to the three key student genres of narrative writing, comparison-contrast essays, and argumentative
essays. Given that the aim of the research was to probe students’ learning experiences with BALL in detail, the
course was taught over a full academic year (i.e., two semesters, which amounts to 36 weeks in total in the
Taiwanese educational system). Students were required to post at least 17 journal or assignment entries on their
blogs in order to ensure an adequate degree of immersion in this experience.
Course design
All classes were conducted in a computer laboratory where each individual student was provided with a computer
connected to the Internet to facilitate in-class blogging activities. All of the participants had either a personal
computer or a laptop at home, so after-class blogging activities were also feasible. Two types of blogs were
concurrently used in the course: a tutor blog and learner blogs (Campbell, 2003). The tutor blog, created and
maintained by the instructor, was used to deliver course information and material and share students’ texts. The
instructor also used the tutor blog to interact with and take questions from students both in and after class. The
learner blogs were owned and maintained by individual student bloggers. Students were required to post their writing
assignments and journals in their own learner blogs; they were asked to provide feedback on fellow students’ entries;
and the participants were encouraged to invite their friends to comment on their blog entries. The research instructor
also marked and commented on all students’ work online. As well as providing a complete record of all teaching
input, the tutor blog also provides access (via its left sidebar) to the learner blogs and to all teacher feedback on
students’ work.
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In the middle of the course, students were also asked to view an online writing lesson produced by the class
instructor on how to write comparison-contrast essays. This lesson used both PowerPoint and video-taping and was
embedded in the tutor blog. The students were encouraged to view and comment on this particular blogging lesson
outside of class and in their own time using a computer connected to the Internet. Immediately after the end of course,
eight students (six females and two males) volunteered to be interviewed about their experiences as learners.
Data collection
The data collected for this study were comprised of in-depth interviews with eight student volunteers. The interviews
took place on the same day and at the same location (the teacher’s office), and the recruited participants were
interviewed in turn. The interview duration for each participant was anticipated to be around 30 minutes. To facilitate
the collection of data relating to the given aim, a group of open-ended questions corresponding to the research
questions listed above was used.
It should be noted that, because the participants’ English proficiency levels were relatively low (i.e., elementary to
intermediate), all interviews were conducted in Mandarin Chinese. This ensured that all students were able to express
themselves equally clearly, precisely and explicitly. (The interview extracts reported later in this paper will be
presented in English translation, however.) In addition to the interviews, the interviewees’ final journal entries were
also collected as these related to the students’ reflections on the course of their learning. Both of these data sources
will be discussed in the analysis result.
Data analysis
The particular qualitative approach used in the research reported in this paper is phenomenological analysis
(Moustakas, 1994; Giorgi & Giorgi, 2008). The classic statement of this methodology is provided by Moustakas
(1994). According to Moustakas, the analyst must begin by producing an exhaustive list of every interviewee
statement that may be relevant to the experience under consideration. The analyst must then reduce and eliminate
unclear statements from this list and sort the remainder into clusters of invariant constituents, statements that express
single concepts or ideas. In phenomenological analysis, the unifying concepts that bind particular sets of invariant
constituents together are known as thematic portrayals. These thematic portrayals in turn form the basis of a further
distillation of participants’ experiences into textural and structural descriptions. Textural descriptions focus on
participants’ thoughts and feelings with regard to these experiences, while structural descriptions attempt to account
for the particular ways in which these feelings and thoughts are connected with the target experience. These two
layers of interpretation are then combined in order to develop a final account of “the meanings and essences of the
experience” for each participant in the research (Moustakas, 1994, p. 121). These individual textural-structural
descriptions may then also be further synthesized into a composite textural-structural description, which presents the
experience of the research participants as a group (McNamara, 2005).
Results
This section will first report on the interview length for each participant. For reasons of space, however, this section
will then present only the main analysis result by providing the composite textural-structural description of students’
blogging experience. For relatively more accessible readability, appropriate subheadings will be used in the
presentation of the composite textural-structural description.
Interview length
An overall interview duration and relevant information is presented in Table 1 (pseudonyms are given for each
student). It should be noted, however, that the interview length on average (around 26 minutes) was slightly shorter
than the anticipated (30 minutes). This is particularly obvious with Zhang and Cindy, who gave relatively less
detailed accounts during the interview. Although their cases may seem less suitable for phenomenological analysis,
where lengthy transcripts are generally preferred, we decided to retain them here because the majority of their
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thoughts and feelings about the experience were found to correspond to a very high degree with those of the other
interviewees.
Table 1. Interview Duration for Each Interviewee
Names
Amy
Gloria
Zhang
Cindy
Olivia
Gender
Female
Female
Female
Female
Female
Interview time (min/sec)
23’27
25’22
21’39
17’38
27’49
English proficiency level*
I
E
I
I
E
No. of journal entries used
2
2
2
2
2
*Note. E stands for elementary; I stands for Intermediate.
Ginger
Female
27’15
I
2
Danny
Male
33’53
I
2
Isaac
Male
32’15
E
2
Composite textural-structural description of the BALL group’s experience
Blogging as journaling
The whole process of learning writing using BALL was often perceived as a means of learning writing by journaling.
Interviewees frequently mentioned how they thought about doing more journaling in order to improve their writing,
or how they felt that keeping a journal was a good way of practicing writing. This was also observed when students
talked about their inactive learning patterns in terms of infrequent journaling. Interestingly, the fact that they were
being required to post their journal entries to the Internet seemed to be less salient here; when reflecting on
journaling as a learning activity, the students tended to focus less on the technological means through which the
activity was being mediated, and more on why they were being required to do it.
Blogging as a fresh, novel, and convenient platform
This is not to say that the students were indifferent to the innovative, computer-mediated format of the program,
however. On the contrary, they described the experience of learning writing by blogging as a fresh and novel one.
The integration of new technology into the learning setting left them perceiving the experience differently from the
conventional, non-online approaches that they had experienced previously in their school careers. For example,
Gloria reflected in her final journal entry that “this experience is so new and cool to me,” a sentiment with which
Cindy also agreed. To many others, BALL was perceived as novel because their entries were published in an online
public setting.
This feature of BALL as a public online learning setting was also deemed convenient, and was one of the very first
feelings that the participants responded to in relation to describing their learning experience. Isaac liked the fact that
he could “take the advantage of retrieving past work”, while Danny regarded the ability to access peer journals as
"convenient." The underlying component of this sense of convenience, however, mostly related to the fact that they
were able to submit assignments online, from any location, and in their own time. As Cindy remarked, “this is very
convenient because I don’t need to worry about forgetting to bring the material or rushing to school to hand in
assignments to the office.” A further perceived advantage was pointed out by Olivia: “blogs are convenient because I
can access material or review your [referring to the teacher] notes any time I like.” It is largely because of this
general sense of convenience that students expressed approval at the idea of BALL being used in future courses.
Improved writing skills through blogging as a form of online mimicry learning
The BALL experience also helped students to cultivate the belief that learning writing skills using blogs can indeed
help them to write more effectively in English. This was seen primarily as a matter of noticing and/or appropriating
‘the good bits’ from peers’ blog entries. “By reading other classmates’ entries, I can review some English words that
I have learned before,” stated Amy; “[blogging] their entries also allows me to pick up some [ideas about] language
usage.” Similarly, Cindy pointed out how “I learned some English phrases for some [Chinese] expressions that I
wanted to use but didn’t know how to,” and Ginger was glad that, by blogging others’ journals, she had picked up
some new words that would be helpful for her future writing. Students also said that they could brainstorm writing
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ideas for their own assignments by reading peer work on blogs. According to Olivia, “removing this setting would
lose me another way of [learning writing].”
Increased awareness of limited linguistic ability woven with concerns about time and enlarged readership through
blogging, in turn causing limited blogging patterns
Throughout the BALL course, students were constantly reminded of their limited language ability and were often
trapped in struggles over deciding whether to blog or not. These anxieties often went together with time management
issues. Although one of the best student writers in the class, Ginger frequently abandoned journal entries before
finishing them because of her concerns about the amount of time needed to ensure correct language use. Isaac and
Cindy also found attending to the accuracy of their blog posts “very time-consuming and troublesome.” As seen
earlier, Danny felt that he was “too busy” to post journal entries in English. Isaac did not even revise his entries at all
according to the teacher’s feedback, as he felt that “revising an entry in English takes ages.”
The students’ consciousness of their low English proficiency levels was also clearly observed through their limited
online communication model, which mainly took place through the comment function in the blogging software used
in the class. Danny confessed that he seldom commented on peer entries because this was required to be done in
English. Similarly, Cindy reported that, most of the time, she had “no idea about what to feed back because it has to
be done in English.” Worried about her use of grammar, Ginger read peer entries without commenting as freely as
she wanted to, restricting herself to anodyne messages of encouragement. Similar anxieties caused Amy to keep her
supplementary journal entries offline, and to impose on herself a policy of “only posting grammatically correct
messages.”
Students felt particularly embarrassed and worried about making grammatical mistakes. Specifically, they often
found themselves feeling worried about readers noticing their errors and laughing at them. Zhang honestly admitted
that she “would mock others’ mistakes, thinking how silly that writer is,” and felt that, in turn, her peers would be
equally critical of her if they observed any mistakes in her blog entries. For similar reasons, Amy refused to share her
learner blog with friends other than her classmates in this research. She disliked the idea that “there would be more
people spotting my grammar mistakes … They may laugh at me.”
The students’ awareness of a large and potentially critical audience for their work and their anxiety about
grammatical mistakes did not affect the amount of effort they put into their writing, however. On the contrary, the
students felt that their motivation levels were unaffected by the BALL method. As Zhang put it: “I am concerned that
others may laugh at me … but I think I write with the same attitude toward writing.” Essentially the same point was
made by Isaac (“My attitude is the same … when I am working on a piece of writing for blogs”) and Danny (“I
wouldn’t deliberately write better because there are more readers … I write what I would have written in any case”).
Amy too reported that “I always write carefully and revise before submitting a piece of writing” and thus “did not
perceive any difference” in her attitude toward writing using a learner blog.
BALL as a toy with amusing colours (convenience, novelty, and freshness) for learning on the outside, but,
unfortunately, the essence inside being perceived to be blandt
Another aspect of the BALL experience that did not seem to have much positive impact on the students’ learning
attitudes and practices was their perception, discussed earlier, of BALL as a fresh, novel and convenient classroom
approach. Although the students thought the BALL format was “cool”, it did not kindle in them any desire to engage
in blogging activities unless they were required to do so. As both Gloria and Isaac remarked, “the convenience [of
BALL] is nothing but convenience.” Even Danny, the most enthusiastic blogger in the group, saw blogging more as
a new technological platform for reading and writing activities than as a new form of literacy practice in its own right.
BALL serving as an informal but ineffective physical setting for learning
Danny did, however, feel that he was writing for his own online space rather than for an assignment while engaged
in BALL activities. He also commented that the teacher’s feedback on his blog felt more like the informal kinds of
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electronic message that he received in the normal course of his daily life (e.g., via SMS messaging or Facebook) than
the formal kinds of instructional feedback received in the traditional writing classroom.
This feeling of informality and casualness was also reported by other members of the interview group. To some
extent, this aspect of the BALL approach was described in positive terms. In particular, interviewees felt that
blogging helped them to perceive writing as a less dry and formal academic activity than hitherto. However, they
also found the physical classroom setting (see Figure 1), in which each student was allocated one computer, unduly
distracting. Ginger even reported that BALL left her feeling less incentivized compared to other methods of teaching,
on the grounds that the classroom setting decreased student-teacher interaction: “The computer monitors block
people’s sight, so you [the teacher] can’t see our faces, and this reduces the interaction [between the teacher and the
class] … it’s like … I can only interact with people sitting next to me”.
Figure 1: The classroom setting for the BALL study
The rest of the interviewed participants admitted that they would spend class time checking email or doing online
window shopping, instead of collaborating with each other on an in-class task or conducting blogging activities, as
they were supposed to be doing. Even when the teacher was speaking to the whole class, many participants had a
feeling that “the computer/Internet was distracting.” Zhang stated that she didn’t “really concentrate in class unless
[the teacher] monitored our computers”. The distraction became even worse when the class was taught via the online
lecture designed for them to view outside the classroom. All of the interviewees reported that they did this at home.
Unfortunately, the majority found it difficult to concentrate on the online teaching input: “I skipped the lesson”; “I
skimmed to the end for the assignment”; “I didn’t stay at my desk all the time”; “I just left the PowerPoint running
and cleaned my room at the same time”. In other words, the students found that, whereas they were distracted by the
computer when doing BALL activities in class, they were more likely to be distracted from the computer when doing
BALL activities outside class.
Discussion and conclusions
The phenomenological account of participants’ experiences of BALL presented above reveals a complex and at
times seemingly contradictory set of meanings and essences that cannot easily be boiled down into a single overall
positive or negative evaluation. On the one hand, the participants described BALL in very positive terms as a novel,
convenient and refreshingly informal alternative to the traditional ESL writing classroom, and were enthusiastic
about the idea of incorporating the BALL format into future classes. On the other hand, and at the same time, the
participants expressed generally negative views about their own experiences as student bloggers, and reported that
the blogging format did not motivate them to do any more than the bare minimum required by the teacher.
It is tempting to interpret these sets of positive and negative evaluations as indicators of the surface attitudes and true
feelings of the participants in the study respectively; as indicating, in other words, that the students approved of the
idea of BALL in principle, but did not actually like doing BALL activities in practice. However, the mode of
analysis employed in this study provides no warrant for this explanation. From a phenomenological point of view, all
statements about experience are equally ‘true’, and thus cannot be arranged into some kind of notional hierarchy of
importance or authenticity. Nevertheless, the current study does allow us to advance some tentative explanations for
why ESL students’ apparent enthusiasm for BALL does not translate into an upsurge of self-directed blogging
activity.
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For this group of learners, at least, enthusiasm for blogging in practice seems to have been inhibited by three
interrelated factors. Firstly, the students found reading and writing blogs in a foreign language (in this case, English)
an onerous task in itself, on account of their limited general English proficiency. In this sense, the students’
experience of learning to write using a blog-assisted methodology seems to have been no different from the
experience of learning to write in a more traditional ESL writing classroom context. Learning to write in a second
language is hard work whatever the methodology, and the use of a blogging format does not seem to have made the
learning process any easier, or sugared the pill to any appreciable degree.
Secondly, the participants in this study said they were inhibited by feelings of worry and embarrassment about
uploading samples of their writing to the very public forum of an Internet blog. The main source of these anxieties
seems not to have been the prospect of their work being viewed and evaluated by the teacher or even by members of
the general public, but unsympathetic classmates who they perceived as likely to ridicule any errors they might make.
The third inhibiting factor seems to have been the slow pace of the students’ blogging activities. This factor is clearly
related to the first; the students took a long time to complete each compulsory BALL task because their general
English proficiency levels were quite low. As a consequence of this, the students were either unwilling or unable to
devote any further time to non-compulsory blogging activities such as journaling or posting comments on peer work.
On the face of it, our finding that students do not find the blog format inherently any more motivating claimed by
previous studies (e.g., Pinkman, 2005; Wu, 2008; Churchill, 2009; Ho & Usaha, 2009; Noytim, 2010; Trajtemberg &
Yiakoumetti, 2011; Taki & Fardafshari, 2012) seems particularly disappointing. In retrospect, however, it is not
entirely surprising that this should be so, given that the students in this research were aged between 18 and 19. This
is the generation for whom Internet access and social media are as ubiquitous and unremarkable as the air that they
breathe (Tan et al., 2010). The assumption that the learning motivation levels of these students may be enhanced by
the use of Web 2.0 technologies may well therefore be a fundamentally misplaced one. Indeed, it probably tells us
more about the perspectives of BALL researchers, most of whom will be from earlier generations who remember life
before the Internet, and who may thus still regard Web 2.0 technologies as inherently wondrous and thus inherently
motivating. If this is correct, however, it raises the intriguing possibility that BALL may be more motivating for
older learners. This could be a fruitful line of inquiry for future BALL research to pursue.
The finding that the students were anxious about peer criticism constitutes a pedagogically much more tractable
problem. Specifically, it may be ameliorated by the addition of an explicit learner training component to the BALL
program, in which the students learn about the value and importance of receiving and responding to constructive
criticism on their work. Following on from this, the course could also incorporate explicit instruction in how to write
constructively critical feedback on other students’ work. Thus, learner training input could become part and parcel of
the core writing skills curriculum, rather than being seen as a peripheral add-on. The problem of slow task
completion rates might also be dealt with in much the same way. It is clear from the interview data that the students
in the current study did not really understand that while formal writing tasks were geared toward the development of
grammatical accuracy and structural appropriacy, the goal of the journaling and peer commenting activities was to
encourage and develop written fluency. They treated all blogging activities as accuracy-based activities, and
consequently spent disproportionately large amounts of time completing what were supposed to be quick, short and
informal blog posts. More explicit consciousness raising activities may have helped these students to understand
more clearly the specific aims of the different kinds of writing task employed in the BALL format, and to adjust their
own writing practices and expectations accordingly. Ensuring clarity about the form and function of the teacher
feedback provided on different kinds of task is also crucial here. We would suggest that whereas it is entirely
reasonable for students to expect formal essay writing tasks to be evaluated in terms of accuracy, it might be
advisable for teacher responses to journal entries and other kinds of informal blog posting activities to focus on
substantive content rather than lexicogrammatical form as a matter of general policy, and to inform students about
this policy (and the rationale for it) at the very beginning of a BALL program. Paradoxically, given the widespread
popular perception of blogging as form of personal diary writing, it may even be advisable to restrict BALL activities
to formal assignments, and to revert to traditional paper notebooks as the medium for more personal and informal
writing activities where the emphasis is on fluency and free expression rather than formal accuracy and reader
evaluation. Alternatively, students could upload personal journal entries to an area of their blogs to which only they
and their teacher have access, if the particular blogging software being used has this functionality.
It should also be noted that there are a number of key limitations to this study that prevent us from making an overall
judgement of this methodology for the time being. First of all, it must be acknowledged that the research reported in
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this thesis is based on just one of many possible teaching approaches. Specifically, students worked by themselves on
most occasions (although they were encouraged to blog with each other for learning), and uploaded work on a
frequent basis and after comparatively short periods of preparation and drafting. This raises the question of whether
these conditions may or may not have contributed to the students’ negative attitudes toward the blogging format in
general. This is a question that can only be answered by repeating the current study using relatively more
collaborative approach, in which students would typically be required to work collaboratively, and to upload work
only after extensive periods of drafting and redrafting, and after extensive peer feedback sessions. It would be
interesting to see whether this approach would lead to any enhanced learning experience compared to those reported
in this thesis. Improving students’ learning experience with BALL (particularly those of low confidence in
themselves or of low proficiency levels in English) may be possible when teacher-researchers help students to
overcome their shyness or mental obstacles of publishing entries publicly online. This can be done adopting a
relatively slower blogging pattern or allowing more collaborative discussions. To be specific, teacher-researchers
may consider getting students to publish a paragraph or short-length text expressing their initial thoughts first, as
these are easier to manage and therefore mistakes in writing can be ironed out. After students develop more
confidence or are used to exposing their thoughts in relatively public settings, teacher-researchers can move students
to work on lengthier articles. Allowing students to have collaborative discussions or work as a pair/group may also
be a way of alleviating students’ anxieties about publishing their individual work and expressing their own ideas and
feelings.
It must also be acknowledged that the results of the study may have been affected to some degree by the classroom
setting, in which the students were working individually at PC terminals at all times during classes. Again, it would
be useful for future studies to consider the impact of different forms of classroom organisation on the students’
overall writing performance and/or perceptions of the BALL methodology. On a related note, it is also worth noting
that the blogging approach may be more or less suitable for students who have different learning styles. This being
the case, it would be interesting and useful for future studies to take students’ learning styles into consideration when
blog use is introduced into classrooms.
Thirdly, the students taught using the blogging approach in the study were often put off because of their limited
English proficiency, which seemed to deter them from blogging or getting motivated to learn writing. It may be
anticipated that a group of advanced EFL student bloggers may experience classroom blogging differently, as their
higher proficiency levels in English may give them more control over blogging activities. This is also a question for
further studies to investigate.
Finally, while our analysis does not lead us to conclude that the hype surrounding BALL is misplaced, it does
suggest that more caution needs to be injected into the discussion. BALL is still a relatively new pedagogy and there
remains much to learn about it. What is already clear from our research, however, is that BALL should not be seen as
a ‘magic bullet’ solution for promoting learning motivation among second language writing students. The students in
our study said that they liked the blog-based format, but in practice they did not find it any more (or any less)
motivating than any other methodology. Our analysis also suggests that we should bear in mind the pace of
technological change in the modern world, and how this affects the perspectives of different groups of observers:
what seems exciting and thus intrinsically motivating to one generation may be humdrum and unremarkable to
another. In the meantime, we would advise against jumping to any premature conclusions about whether second
language writing teachers should run with the BALL, throw it to a team-mate, or drop it altogether.
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