English 5 is now over. The students have danced their Seniors’ Ball and are enjoying the winter break.
As a teacher I am enjoying reading students’ blog entries. Calling it enjoyment sounds ironical, but I mean it. Quite sincerely, now that deadlines aren’t pushing, I can read the articles in peace and with thought, reflect on the process of producing our blog content from various points of view, and enjoy my own meditations on the whole.
The very fact that our students were writers of the same blog at the same time, while they taking course ENA5, hopefully created a shared learning environment for the four groups involved. The fact that they were blog editors/writers and not just commentators, hopefully , likewise, helped them get new insights to the blogging world.
Using web resources to write the articles was the kind of language learning that we would strongly like to see promoted. It is integrating content and language, and making language learning a natural process of acquisition while processing content (CLIL and ESL). Our teenagers are screenagers (see link to a book by Richard Watson) and are in a fair way of learning English just like that, as a by-product of living a life online in the English-medium Internet.
It’s not plain sailing though. There are still problems with the language. The main problem is grammatical accuracy. Students simply make mistakes with grammar and usage. But this problem can be addressed in their classroom studies. What’s more, we have sanguine expectations as to the reduction of language errors both through exposure to language and trough producing language oneself.
It was not plain sailing with using web resources ethically. Students had obvious difficulties to draw the line of creating their own text drawing on the resources used and between plagiarism and misuse of intellectual property. But if the process of researching and writing , together with the feedback from the teachers helped clarify this issue somewhat, valuable learning has taken place.
A link here to read more on the topic cyber ethics.

In conclusion, we, the course teachers, would like to thank the students on making this blog work!