Blogging Our Way to Digital Literacies? A Critical View on Blogging in Foreign Language Classrooms

… IS THINKING ABOUT… by Peter Schildhauer (Bielefeld)

 Abstract

Ours is the time of digital media. Today’s students are and will be faced with tremendous societal changes in all fields of life – and they will have to be able to master a range of digital practices along the way. Consequently, educational setups that teach literacies cannot focus on print media as well as reading and writing standard language alone anymore, but have to prepare students for the challenges ahead by addressing a diversity of (digital) genres and registers. In this article, I focus on Foreign Language Teaching (FLT) and argue that the personal weblog is a genre that lends itself to teaching digital literacies. I use the pedagogical principles suggested by the New London Group in their seminal work on multiliteracies to analyse and evaluate various authentic classroom blogging scenarios. With this critical view on the practical examples, I aim at encouraging and providing impulses for future classroom blogging scenarios in FLT.

The Contribution

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The Author

Peter Schildhauer studied gymnasiales Lehramt (German / English) at the universities of Halle-Wittenberg and Newcastle (UK). He received his PhD in 2014 for his thesis on the history of personal weblogs. His research interests lie in the fields of text- and media-linguistics, computer-mediated communication and digital education. Currently, he works as a lecturer at Bielefeld University. Together with Jana Pflaeging, he is editor-in-chief of 10plus1.