VOICE BLOG: AN EXPLORATORY STUDY OF LANGUAGE LEARNING By:

Yu-Chih Sun

This article is about a research that was done by a teacher in Taiwan to prove that voice blogging
is a great approach to enhancing students oral proficiency in English by providing them with
opportunities to practice speaking and to enhance their public presentation skills. The research
involved 46 students from two oral communication classes.
Voice blog basically is taking a voice recording of yourself in English and having it accessible on
the internet (in this class it was accessible only within the class). The researcher set up one blog
for each course enabling the two classes to interact with each other therefore gaining a wider
audience. Each space included the bloggers basic information, photo and self-introduction. Each
student had to upload a total of 30 voice blogs and 10 response entries for one semester. For the
interview part of the research, 12 participants were selected but 6 were interviewed in the
Chinese language. This was to see the students learning processes and strategies in relation to the
blog, difficulties faced and solutions to these difficulties.
At the end of the research, it was seen that the participants went through a series of blogging
stages (conceptualizing, brainstorming, articulation, monitoring and evaluation). They were able
to select their own topics and freely express themselves in English. In my opinion, this research
was really good and showed that there are other ways in which English can be taught, especially
having each student take responsibility in their learning. It integrated a lot of self-motivation to
learn and use English. As the research stated, there is not a lot of opportunities to speak the
language outside of class, I feel that voice blogging really created that opportunity to do so. One
thing I would suggest is to make the blog accessible to anyone as this will create a greater

audience and have more people actively involved in the learners blog by providing helpful
feedback, suggestions and help. I consider using this in my future classroom.
Sun.Y.C. (2009). Language learning and technology.Voice blog: an exploratory study of
language learning.(pg 88-103) National Chiao Tung University.