Teacher-student blogs: interaction and effectiveness

Rachel Wicaksono, York St John University, York, UK

Background

In June and July 2006 an Italian university student, Antonio Tanzola, and I kept a blog for theBBC

Learning English

website. Antonio wrote a daily account of his activities and Iresponded with advice on writing skills, grammar and vocabulary. In addition, readers postedtheir comments and questions.

Interaction in the blog: Self-evaluation of teacher taIk (SETT)

To explore patterns of teacher-student interaction in the blog I used a framework developed byWalsh (2006), known as SETT. The framework provides teachers with a way of describingtheir talk and linking it to lesson aims. It assumes that lessons are made up of a series of episodes or ‘modes’, each with different aims and interactional features:

•

managerial

(organising learners, starting/stopping activities, giving/checkinginstructions);

•

materials

(using materials to elicit, check, clarify and extend learners’ contributions and provide practice);

•

skills and systems

(focussing on accuracy, helping learners produce correct forms andcorrecting mistakes);

•

classroom context

(focussing on fluency, establishing contexts in which learners cancommunicate at length).

Managerial mode

My posts included very little teacher talk in managerial mode. This may be because theformat of the blog (one student writes, one teacher responds) was decided in advance andneeded no further organisation or explanation. Furthermore, writing can convey meaningmore concisely than speaking and can be re-read, therefore achieving managerial-typeinteraction more efficiently than in a ‘real’ classroom.

Materials mode

Interaction that focussed on ‘materials’ was difficult to identify, perhaps because of differences between the blog and a ‘real’ classroom. Walsh’s examples of materials include agap-fill exercise, reviewing a unit from the course book and watching a video clip. Hecategorises all these episodes as ‘materials’ mode because, ‘turn-taking, turn sequence andtopic management

all flow from the material

’ [my italics]. In the blog,

all

of the turn-taking,turn sequence and topic management flowed from the written text we co-created.

Skills and systems mode

In this mode (which made up about half of my ‘teacher talk’), I usually wanted Antonio to payattention to specific features of his English. For example, describing how he forgot to eatdinner during a football on television, he said, ‘I realised that I wasn’t been eating anythingfor 20 hours.’ I corrected his sentence to, ‘I realised I hadn’t eaten anything…’ and wroteabout the Past Perfect. In his next entry, Antonio provided evidence of translating, analysingcontrastively, and transferring,In the last post I wanted to write, ‘I hadn’t been eating’ but I used ‘be’ instead of ‘have’. When I don’t pay enough attention I often make this error because of thedifferent Italian auxiliary verb. Anyway, I would like to ask you if the Past PerfectContinuous can be used in that situation instead of the Past Perfect?The skills and systems mode pushed Antonio to extend and clarify his output. For example, he wrote, ‘The most important [place] has surely been ‘Certosa di Padula’, whichI’m going to shortly talk about.’ I asked whether he intended to say that he was going to talk about the place soon (shortly) or in a few words (briefly). In his next post Antonio describedthe monastery and then wrote, ‘I’ve just briefly talked about ‘Certosa di Padula’!’ Hecontinued,In the sentence ‘[…] I’m going to shortly talk about’, which I wrote in my last post, Imeant ‘not in detail’ and so I incorrectly used ‘shortly’ instead of ‘briefly’. It’s afunny mistake, Rachel, isn’t it? The sentence meaning in fact changes completely butdoesn’t become unrealistic.