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Procedures
The teacher-researcher described and illustrated the functions of the class voice blog during the first class meeting. Each student was required to log into the Web site during the first week of the class. Students had to upload 15 voice-blog entries and 5 voice responses to classmates' blog entries by the mid-term week and by the final-exam week, i.e., a total of 30 voice-blog and 10 response entries. The teacher-researcher explained to the students that the blog activity was mainly an out-of-class opportunity for additional, extensive speaking practice and tried to make the blog experience informal, personal, and exploratory by allowing students to determine what they wanted to say and when and how they wanted to say it. Neither formal instruction about how to prepare a voice-blog post, nor a list of expectations regarding how to achieve a good quality voice-blog post were offered.
The following excerpts are transcribed examples of voice-blogs that represent four purposes of blogging based on content analysis and categorization of students' blog posts. Language errors in the posts have not been edited.
Enhancement of oral-communication skills
Title: I love this class
Hello, everyone. I'm Ben. At the beginning of this semester, I was in a dilemma, whether I should take this class or not. After a struggle, I decide to take this class as a, as a challenge in the last semester of my college life as a student. I'm, at first, I was a-, afraid of being on the stage, uh, to give a speech in public because of my poor English. And I cannot express myself very well, even in Chinese, not, not to say in English. I feel nervous if, if a, somebody will, uh, be unsatisfied with my performance and laugh at me and pick out my faults. But during the, during the whole semester, I found everybody was so kind and would encourage others to speak English, to express their thought, their own story. Um, I really appreciate it. Um, because of this, I found learning English could be very fun.... As the teacher said, at, uh, this semester's end, but it should be the step stone of your learning travel. And I should work hard and learn English, be confident with myself, and I, I have to say that, uh, learning English is very fun.
Self-presentation
Title: Lifu, a dog friend of mine
Lifu is a dog in my neighborhood. She's a girl. She's one year. I first met her last December. She was very skinny, and I, and I'm scared. I've never seen a dog so skinny before. I just couldn't touch her. But now, she grows up and becomes healthier, stronger. Every time I go out, I hope to see her, so I can play with her. She'll sit down in front of me and let me touch her. She's very quiet. Just let me touch her. Scientist say that if a dog is sitting in front of you and being very quiet, it means that the dog is making friends with you and being the body guard for you. I'm happy that Lifu trust me, and now we are friends anyway.
Information exchange
Title: Can you keep a secret?
I read an English novel. It is called Can You Keep a Secret? I noticed this book because its cover. Its cover color is purple and the title is pink, pink, so I check this book out from our school's library. It is a story about a woman who doesn't feel satisfied with her life at all. She thinks her life sucks and everything is not going well. Until one day, she met a man on the plane. They came across an air disturbance, so the woman thinks that she's going to die. She can't help telling the man who sits beside her everything in her life, every her little secret. It is an interesting story, and the books also makes me think about an question. Can woman, can a woman tell her lover everything in her life? I think everyone can think about it.
Social networking
Title: Coward boy
I think I am a shy boy. Every time, I can't catch the opportunities. The most important reason is that I don't have much courage. For example, sometimes, the teacher ask every classmates some questions and invite someone who know the answer to share it. I knew the answer, but I dare not to raise my hand. Another example, if I like a girl very much, I have no courage to tell her. What I dare to do is to care for her at a distance. I'm really a coward boy. Okay, in the end, if anyone want to make a friend with me, you can call dorm phone, five-five-six-six. I'm very pleasure.
Survey Instrument
The researcher developed a voice-blog survey that consisted of a 45-item, five-point Likert scale (see Appendix). It included three subcategories: (a) learners' perceived gains in speaking skills (7 items), (b) self-reported learning processes and learning strategies (18 items), and (c) the learners' attitudes toward the class blog (20 items). Participants were asked to rate their agreement on the scale (1 = strongly disagree, 2 = disagree, 3 = undecided, 4 = agree, 5 = strongly agree).
Table 1 presents the subscales of the survey. The survey questions were presented in the students' first language (Chinese) to ensure that they understood the questions. The survey was administered at the end of the semester.
Interviews
To gain a broad perspective on student's blogging processes, the teacher-researcher interviewed a variety of participants. The present study adopted stratified sampling to "ensure the representative presence of particular subgroups of the population under study" (Mackey & Gass, 2005, p. 120). An initial pool of 12 students was selected. The characteristics taken into consideration were gender, major, year of study, blog performance, and course grade. These specific characteristics were taken into consideration as they are commonly identified in studies as important demographic information. A sample drawn from such an informed selection is believed to be more representative than a random sample, particularly because of the limited sample size.
Of the 12 students invited to participate in the interviews, 10 agreed to do so. The teacher-researcher chose 6 of them to interview. Again, this selection was made to include as wide a variety of student characteristics as possible so that their comments can be as representative and generalizable as possible. Of the 6 interview participants, 2 were female and the other 4 were male; 2 were sophomores, 2 were juniors, and 2 were seniors. Each came from a different field of study (electronic and civil engineering, electrophysics, industrial-engineering management, materials science, and transportation technology and management). Their blog performance and in-class performance vary to some extent. The interviews were conducted individually in Chinese, the students' first language, which allowed them to express their ideas fluently and fully. All of the interviews were audiotaped and later transcribed verbatim in Chinese for further analysis. Each interview lasted about one hour. The rationale for the interview questions was to gather information relating to four major areas: (a) students' learning processes in relation to the blogs, (b) related learning strategies, (c) difficulties encountered, and (d) solutions to those difficulties.
RESULTS
Over the course of a semester (18 weeks), the 46 participants uploaded a total of 1,239 voice-blog entries and 646 comments on their classmates' blog entries. On average, each participant posted 27 voice blogs and 14 comments on the class blog over the course of one semester.
Research question 1: What are the learners' learning processes and learning strategies?
Time
The results of the survey indicate that the self-reported average time that each participant spent creating a voice-blog entry ranged widely (See Table 2). On average, each student spent approximately 209-1,254 minutes in total working on the blogs over the course of the semester.
Blogging stages
For the purpose of triangulating the findings, data was collected by surveying the learners' blogging processes, investigating learning strategies, and conducting retrospective interviews. The blogging stages which emerged are summarized in Table 3.
Conceptualizing
The first stage involved planning what to say and how to say it. One of the most frequently reported difficulties in the conceptualizing stage concerned the need to determine the content of the voice-blog. The results of the survey show that over 71% of the participants found it difficult to come up with an appropriate voice-blog topic due to topic-related language limitations. However, 49% of the participants reported that topic selection became easier with continual practice. Participants compensated for difficulties in topic selection by either selecting familiar themes or locating helpful resources. Below are some comments made by the participants:
1. It's difficult for me to talk about everyday events in English, so I tend to talk about something general, easy, and common, like sports, leisure activities, or the books I am reading.
2. If I am unsure about what to say, I'll listen to others' blogs to get some inspiration.
3. I hope to build an interesting blog, so I try to select special topics like the Bermuda Triangle mystery as attention-getters. To speak on the topic, I look for relevant online information and visit some Web sites. I also look up words in an electronic dictionary for Chinese-English or English-Chinese translations.
Comment 1 shows that blogs provide students with freedom of topic selection and, thus, allow them to talk about topics within their ability and of their interest. Comment 2 shows how a blog community can enhance interaction and support among bloggers. Comment 3 shows how a blog community helps develop a sense of audience for the bloggers and encourages creation of blogs that are attractive and informative to the audience. The results of the interviews reveal that even though some students felt that they lacked a sufficient grasp of the language to express their thoughts, the asynchronous nature of voice blogging allowed them to search for needed information by consulting a dictionary or performing an Internet search.
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