The Effectiveness of Integrating Weblogs as a Tool to Enhance EFL Students’ Writing Proficiency

Abstract

Lately, the integration of weblogs as a web-based platform has witnessed an increase in EFL classrooms as an authentic teaching and learning tool. The current research aims at exploring the effectiveness of integrating weblogs as a supplementary tool to enhance EFL learners‟ writing proficiency. It also explores EFL teachers and students‟ attitudes towards this tool in order to provide innovative methods for teaching writing to assist EFL learners in enhancing their writing skills. In addition to that, it attempts to investigate the possible benefits and barriers that surround the utilization of weblogs. The research follows both quantitative and qualitative approaches. A questionnaire was distributed to a sample of 20 master‟s students at the English department from different specialties. The second research tool is an interview conducted with 6 teachers at the University of AbdelHamid Ibn Badis from the English department. The results of the study revealed students and teachers‟ positive attitudes towards incorporating the weblog application in the educational context as a resource to develop students‟ writing proficiency. It can also be concluded that weblogs hold an effective and positive impact on students‟ learning process through the benefits that are demonstrated from teachers‟ interview which indicates that blogs supports reflective thinking in way that it enhance it and it develops creative thinking, in addition, it bridges the gap between classroom and the world and between students and their teachers. It is recommended that the teachers use innovative teaching tools rather than the traditional ones since students needs and interests have changed with the emergence of technology to the educational field. Further recommendations and limitations of the study are discussed in details.