Blogs and the writing skill development

Abstract

This research work's objective was to analyze the impact of blogs on the development of writing skills in the English language. The participants were 67 students belonging to the third year of Baccalaureate from “Rodríguez Albornoz” High School. The methodology used had a quantitative approach, with a quasi-experimental design since two groups were the study subject; one control and one experimental. In addition, a pre-test was applied to determine the level of competence in writing skills of both groups. It was assessed by means of a rubric that contained five writing sub-skills such as content & creativity, organization, punctuation & spelling, language and style. In the same way, the intervention was performed, in which the use of blogs was incorporated with the experimental group for eight weeks. Therefore, each week the students who took part in the experiment had to publish a blog with the assigned topic. Furthermore, there was one week in which the students were introduced on the use of blogs, their creation and the writing process as well as the structure of articles. Likewise, before the publication of each blog, various activities were carried out for the students to become familiar with the topic; such as, brainstorming, reading articles, taking notes about videos or conversations, discussions, summaries, etc. In addition, guiding questions were provided so that students can write their blog without any difficulty. Subsequently, the post-test was applied for both groups. The data obtained in the pre and post-test were analyzed through T-student. The pre-test results revealed that the students in the control and experimental groups had a low level of writing skills. However, after the intervention with blogs; the students in the experimental group showed a remarkable improvement in the development of written skills. Therefore, the impact of blogging on students' writing ability was demonstrated