[ELTWeekly Volume 7, Issue 9 | April 6, 2015 | ISSN 0975-3036]
When thinking about using blogs and forums in the classroom, higher-level learners seem to be the obvious choice of target audience. They certainly make the teacher’s job easier: they can understand instructions more easily and therefore don’t need as much guidance to get to the right places online. Higher-level learners also have greater linguistic resource, so it’s easier to think of interesting topics for them to write about. Perfect, no?
Not quite, but blogs and forums do provide us with a very effective way of challenging more advanced learners. These tools give students that measure of expressive freedom that they don’t necessarily get at lower levels, given that the proportion of controlled practice gets higher the further down the levels you go. When students are at B2 and beyond, they have enough language to get stuck into some chunky subjects and show off what they know, think and feel.
All of this may be true, but we might still ask: do students want to show off, or do they still need some structure within which to express themselves?