ABSTRACT
Blogging has emerged as one of the most popular forms of online
discourse. The ease and lack of expense in setting up blogs has raised
intriguing possibilities for language learning classrooms. The unique
nature of their architecture and their low cost have not only affected
how students can publish and distribute their work to a wider audience
but also how they see themselves as authors. This paper focuses on the
use of blogs in an L2 writing course concentrating on the controversies
surrounding plagiarism. Blogs were used as a means of generating ideas
for their academic papers and as texts that could be cited in their
papers. This paper analyzes the blogs of a Somali immigrant student to
explore blogs' relationship to the development of his academic
writing. His purposes and strategies for using blogs are discussed both
as a way of seeing the variety of writing strategies he developed in his
blogs, as well as what his use of blogs could tell his teachers about
the strengths and weaknesses of his writing. The paper attempts to
improve our understanding of how blogging in L2 composition courses can
contribute to the development of a student's writing.
INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND RESEARCH
There has been tremendous worldwide growth in blogging in a variety
of different languages. Blogging has been around for a number of years.
Blogs have been used in various ways: as online journals, a means of
designing hypertexts, and, more radically, to create what Blood (2002)
calls the first native form of discourse on the Internet. She argues
that blogging best reflects the dream of Tim Berners-Lee (2000), who was
one of the principal designers of the World Wide Web, to make the Web
into something truly interactive both in terms of how texts are read and
how they can be easily posted and accessed. Blogs can be set up either
by a teacher or a student, often at no cost, on a blogging service.
Blogs can be set up for individual students, for a group of students, or
for an entire class. The burgeoning interest in blogging has aroused the
interest of ESL/EFL teachers who see blogging as a simple and low cost
way of giving students access to publishing and distributing their
writing on the Internet, as a method of providing them with the
experience of writing in a digital format, and as a means of discussing
issues related to their classroom work and their lives. (1)
Blogs have what is called an open architecture, meaning that they
can be viewed, if so desired, by anyone connected to the Internet. This
openness is unlike the architectures underlying other forms of
asynchronous technologies such as listservs and course management
programs like WebCT, which cannot be viewed unless specific permission
is given. These types of on-line discussions have been referred to as
"gated communities" (Lowe & Williams, 2004). However, the
openness can give students a greater sense of the variety of possible
audiences they can reach, both for understanding these audiences and
learning strategies to respond to them. As Fleishman (2002) put it,
"blogging is the art of turning one's own filter on news and
the world into something others might want to read, link to, and write
about" (p. 107).
One of the most interesting questions that the growth of blogging
has raised for composition teachers is whether the growth of blogging
has changed the nature of authorship on the Internet in comparison to
other forms of computer-mediated discourse. Unlike the creation of
hypertext, which tended to de-center the author (e.g., Bolter, 2001),
blogging seems to have reinstated the centrality of the author as the
primary creator of the text. While listservs and websites are frequently
organized around specific topics, blogs center on an author or small
groups of authors. Readers can comment on the texts but the blog is
still primarily identified with its author or authors. Shirkey (2003)
illustrates this new role for authorship on the Web by citing the
numerous cases of bloggers who have achieved fame and sometimes fortune
because of their blogs.
One reason that blogging has become a popular form of online
discourse has been in its ability to contribute to the discussion of
issues in the public sphere throughout the world. Advocates of blogging
have argued that they provide a radical approach to democratic
expression uncontrollable by local authorities (e.g., Lebkowsky &
Ratcliffe, 2005). The essence of democratic blogging is to be able to
publish opinions regardless of status and free from traditional
gatekeepers, creating what can be called a global "public
sphere." Therefore, for ESL/EFL teachers, blogging would seem a
potentially useful tool for creating a space to discuss issues that may
not be the focus of the traditional classroom (Bloch & Crosby,
2006). For all these reasons, blogging seemed to be an ideal technology
to use for a discussion of an issue such as plagiarism, which is both
controversial and not always fully discussed in a classroom setting.
The focus of this paper will be on the blogging experience of one
student, a Somali immigrant. This paper first examines how blogging was
integrated into an L2 composition course, focusing in particular on how
blogging can be used for helping students develop rhetorical strategies
necessary for academic writing.
Blogging and Generation 1.5 students
The composition course where blogging was implemented was our
lowest level, post-admission academic writing course for non-native
speakers. The majority of the students in this course were Asian, but
about one quarter of them had come from East Africa and had spent at
least two years in a US high school. The university has had an influx of
East African, particularly Somali, students. Some of these students had
experienced a great deal of difficulty in this course, and there was a
high failure rate. There is a growing literature on these immigrant
students, who are sometimes referred to as Generation 1.5 students,
since they may have been partly raised and educated in their home
culture and partly in the US high school system (Harklau, 2000; Harklau,
Losey, & Siegal, 1999; Leki, 1999; Roberge, 2002). The term
Generation 1.5, which was first used by Rumbaut & Ima (1988), has
often been vaguely defined. The term has been used to differentiate
adult immigrants and their children born in the United States and those
who immigrated but spent at least some time in the US school system and
therefore may have become more acculturated to American life. These
students have varying degrees of facility with speaking, reading, and
writing in their heritage language as well as in English. The term is
also useful in L2 composition to differentiate immigrant students from
international students and from immigrants who arrived in the US after
high school. However, the backgrounds of Generation 1.5 students are not
monolithic and can be differentiated based on the degree of bilingualism
(Valdes, 1992), as well as a variety of other factors, including
cultural, economic, linguistic, and family backgrounds, that have been
shown to differentiate the educational experiences of these students
(Portes & Hao, 1998).
Research has indicated that Generation 1.5 students may have
different backgrounds from international students who come from areas
where literacy is widespread. Blanton (2005) uses the term
"literacy interrupted" to describe how this difference in L1
literacy can affect learning to write in a second language. Blanton
found that Generation 1.5 students whose literacy development had been
interrupted do not always have experience working with texts as do
students who have been writing in either their first or second language
throughout their lives. These students may also learn in different ways
than those traditionally valued. Reid (1997) uses the term "ear
learner" to describe how these students can rely on their oral
skills to compensate for the lack of development of their written
skills. Thus, the problem is not that they have lower levels of writing
than other L2 students, but they have less, or perhaps no, experience
with academic writing, what Blanton refers to as lacking a sense of the
textuality of literacy.
Blanton's research indicates that different approaches for
these East African students may be necessary. Our previous research had
found that blogging could be useful in an academic writing class for
students with these kinds of problems (Bloch & Crosby, 2006). The
blogging experiences of a Somali student was therefore chosen. Somali
literacy has only emerged recently (Lewis, 1993), and the ongoing
political turmoil in Somalia has meant that many of the students have
only a limited level of literacy in their home language. Their
experiences in American high schools may have exposed them to some forms
of literacy but not necessarily the kinds of academic literacy often
found in college composition courses. Research into the types of writing
found in US high schools has indicated that high school students often
have little or no preparation with using texts (Hillocks, 2002).
Hillocks found that much of the class time is focused on more expressive
forms of writing such as personal essays or reviews of books. These
forms of writing often draw more heavily on the students' oral
language, which is often referred to as vernacular literacy (Camitta,
1993).
In this context, our teaching group felt that blogging could be
used as a means of bridging between the more vernacular forms of
literacy the students already possessed and academic forms of literacy
in the classroom. However, integrating these vernacular forms of
literacy still raises pedagogical questions for the composition teacher.
Harklau (2000) argues that this vernacular literacy may not be valued
highly in the academic writing classroom. In such a rhetorical context,
the strengths of these students may be ignored while their weaknesses
may be magnified, an imbalance that we hoped blogging could reduce.
Therefore, while blogging itself could be considered an important form
of literacy, it was also important to explore blogging as a tool in the
acquisition of more academic forms of writing.
Blogging, Academic Writing, and Teaching about Plagiarism
The primary goal of the course was to introduce the students to
formal academic writing and the rules for the rhetorical importance and
proper attribution of source texts. The course was influenced by
literature on the rhetoric of academic discourse (e.g., Bazerman, 1988;
Gilbert & Mulkay, 1984; Latour, 1988) and the concept of genre
(e.g., Berkenkotter & Huckin, 1995; Swales, 1991). The topic of the
course focused on the controversy over what plagiarism is, the
definition of plagiarism, and the policies for dealing with it (Howard,
1999; Marsh, 2004; Pecorari, 2003), with the hope being that a
blog-based discussion would then lead to an academic paper.
Students do not often have a clear enough understanding of
plagiarism to be able to think critically about it and, as a result, are
often vulnerable to being accused of plagiarizing. Students are usually
lectured to about plagiarism without the chance to have any input on
either the prescriptive rules regarding plagiarism or the potentially
damaging consequences of violating or misunderstanding these rules. It
was felt that, by engaging students in a discussion of plagiarism, they
would be better able to understand how plagiarism is viewed in the
university, its relationship to academic writing, and strategies for
avoiding its consequences. In this way, the students could develop a
critical perspective on some of the controversies regarding plagiarism.
As Graff (1989) has argued, the integration of the nature of the
content and the form of literacy is a crucial element of what he calls a
critical literacy. He argues that critical literacy should be seen as a
dynamic process that is linked to a changing view of both self and
society. Therefore, he goes on to argue that it must play a central role
in learning to read and write.
The critical literacy we are seeking must be based not
only on a radically revised and more demanding curriculum,
but also on an epistemology and theoretical critique that
grasps the centrality of ambiguity, complexity, and
contradiction to literacy and life (p. 51).
In our course, blogging was integrated into this process of
developing a critical view of plagiarism. Blogs have often been used in
content area courses to foster a collaborative process of making meaning
(Lowe & Williams, 2004; Wiltse, 2004). We chose to set up a class
blog rather than have students set up individual blogs because we
believed there was a greater probability the students would read each
other's blogs if they were in one space, and we wanted to give them
a greater sense of working together by having them read and respond to
the blogs, and later to use them as texts in their academic papers.
Little is known about the differences between using individual and group
blogs (cf. Farmer, 2005). In his study of group blogs, Rutigliano (2004)
found that they could be organized in different ways with different
degrees of control, identification, and levels of access. We set up the
blog so that anyone could read the blog but only the students in the
class could post to it. Moreover, because there were two sections in
this course, it was felt that a group blog would encourage the two
classes to interact.
The specific assignments for postings to the blog attempted to
exploit the different ways blogs are most often used in what is called
"the blogosphere." To date, there have been two primary types
of blogs: issues-oriented blogs that discuss social and political
issues, and identity blogs that discuss personal issues. Based on these
uses, four specific goals for the use of the class blog were created:
1) To write using a variety of genres both personal and academic
2) To discuss and negotiate a variety of issues related to
plagiarism
3) To provide a space outside the classroom for students to
collaborate and argue
4) To create texts that could both express students' own
viewpoints and be used by other students to critique or support their
views
By framing the use of blogs in this way, we hoped to capture
different types of writing, which could be used to achieve the goals of
the course. Although the focus of the class was on the teaching of
academic writing, this kind of expressive writing has been shown to be
important both for developing fluency (Casanave, 2004) and as a bridge
between the students' oral second language and the academic
language they are learning, which can be particularly important for
writers who may not be literate in their L1 (Harklau et al., 1999).
THE BLOGGING OF A GENERATION 1.5 STUDENT
In this section, I am going to illustrate the use of blogs by
focusing on one Somali immigrant student, whom I will call Abdullah.
This student was one of three East African immigrants who had been
placed in this post-admission L2 composition class. Abdullah's
education prior to coming to the United States had been disrupted by the
ongoing civil war in Somalia. Abdullah had attended high school in the
US for three years, and, like many members of this younger generation,
he had received a very spotty education in the resettlement camp.
In order to discuss how Abdullah used the class blog and what it
told us about his writing development, I will analyze several of his
blog entries. One of our first goals was to have the students use the
blog as a means of presenting a more personal image of themselves to the
other students. As Farmer (2004) argues, blogging can provide writers a
means of projecting themselves as "real people" in a virtual
world. In the first assignment, we had asked the students to write about
themselves as an introduction to their classmates and their teacher. As
his introductory entry indicates, Abdullah had a fascinating life and
ambitious plans for college.
I was born in Mogadishu in 1985 at Banadir Hospital.
Mogadishu is the capital city of Somalia in East Africa.
I grew up in Madina County. Madina is one of the largest
counties in Mogadishu. At the beginning of 1991, the
central government of Somalia collapsed because of the
dictator who had been in power over twenty-one years. After
that, we hoped new government would come. Unfortunately,
leaders disagreed about forming the new government and this
triggered a civil war.... After two and half years while I
attended Dunwoody High School, my brother decided to move
to Columbus, Ohio. I enrolled at Walnut Ridge High School and
continued working hard in school. I earned academic achievement
honor roll and super honor roll. I was named to the All City
Soccer Team, and I was named third team in the central district.
When I graduate from Walnut Ridge in June 2003, I plan to attend
the Ohio State University for four years in order to earn my
degree in Pre-Medicine. I will then go to medical school and
become a surgeon. Hard work and persistence are a way of life for
me, and I take these qualities into everything that I do. I have
been encouraged by many and I try very hard to be just as
encouraging to others. From the time I was a small child I have
always known that the way I can best help improve the quality of
life for others is to become a surgeon. I want to absorb as much
knowledge and master as many skills as I can, and share what I have
learned through helping and healing others. (2)
Because he had spent more time in an English-language environment,
Abdullah spoke more fluently than the other, predominately Asian,
students in the class. By having the students blog without concern for
grammar, we hoped that we could draw out the more developed aspects of
their language ability. Writing about personal experiences allows them
to draw more upon their vernacular forms of literacy. Using this form of
literacy can give a writer a sense of authority and authorship, both of
which may be more difficult to obtain when they write academic papers
(Blanton, 1998). Abdullah seems to bring a strong sense of authority to
his writing, which was consistent with what has been seen in previous
research on East African students. For example, in her study of an
Ethiopian Generation 1.5 student, Blanton (2005) found that her student
also demonstrated a clear purpose when writing online. Blogging may
foster a more oral and personal style of writing with which some
students may feel more comfortable.
Blogging, as with other forms of online discourse, can also foster
the development of social communities, if only for a short period. This
sense of community was important because of the disparate backgrounds of
the students, who were primarily from Korea and Taiwan, except for the
three East Africans and one Arab student. We found, at least among the
immigrant students, that some felt there was a tension between these
groups. As one of the East African students explained to her teacher,
there were really "two classes" (Cathryn Crosby, personal
communication, November 14, 2003), which indicated the distance the East
African students felt from their predominantly Asian classmates who
sometimes came to the university with what Harklau (2000) calls
"privileged social status and educational backgrounds" (p.
58). As Abdullah's first blog entry illustrates, publishing and
distributing personal information through blogging can be a good way to
break through some of those barriers, particularly in situations where
students feel isolated.
Using Blogs to Foster Critical Literacy in an Academic Writing
Class
Another goal for the use of blogging was to provide a space for
students to think critically about plagiarism and the policies regarding
plagiarism that had been institutionalized by the university, while
using the kinds of rhetorical strategies for critical evaluation that
they would also need in their academic writing. Much has been written
about how online discourse can foster an alternative writing space in
which writers feel a greater sense of freedom to express their ideas and
to argue than they might feel in the classroom (e.g., Bloch, 2004),
which can in turn help students develop a critical perspective in their
writing (Bloch & Crosby, 2006).
We wanted students to voice their opinions on how they thought
plagiarism should be defined and how it should be dealt with in the
university. The university was at that time considering the use of the
plagiarism detection website (www.turnitin.com), which had been
mentioned in the article the students had read about a high school girl
accused of plagiarism (Heaton, 2003). Being able to critically evaluate
prior research has been shown to play an important role in establishing
the validity of claims in academic writing (Latour, 1988). Therefore, it
was hoped that the students could draw upon their blogs when they later
wrote their papers. In this blog entry, Abdullah was asked to critically
evaluate whether Turnitin.com should be used by the university.
The site www.turnitin.com is designed to detect the unoriginal
student work. The idea is good; it helps teachers to see if
students were able to do the project independently. This
site gives a fast possibilities to check essays and get strong
evidence about what internet sources were used and how much. The
problem about this site appears after checking: how to interpret
the results.
This posting shows Abdullah's potential for developing an
argument in his academic writing. Abdullah is able to present both sides
of the controversy over the use of Turnitin.com, identifying the problem
of interpreting whether a piece of writing had, in fact, been
plagiarized--an issue that has become one of the major criticisms of the
website (e.g. Marsh, 2004). Abdullah even goes beyond the assignment to
offer a suggestion for how students should deal with problems related to
using source texts without having to cheat by copying from the Internet.
In the way he evaluates both sides of the issue, we see evidence of a
more formal academic style, reflecting a critical academic literacy we
hoped he could also display in his classroom assignments.
This approach to critical discourse relies heavily on the
students' ability to reflect on and critique the texts they were
reading in class. We often found, however, that when using source texts,
the students either stuck very close to the text, sometimes to the
extent of what might be called either plagiarizing or patchwriting
(Howard, 1999), or, more often, simply ignored the text. To help them
reflect on this relationship between this kind of intertextuality and
plagiarism, we gave them another story about a Generation 1.5 student
named Marita who had been accused of plagiarism for not understanding
the nature of the constraints that are placed on textual borrowing
(Rose, 1989). Rose identifies the problem that students such as Marita
have as an inability "to weave quotations with her own prose, to
mark the difference, how to cite whom she used, how to strike the proper
balance between her writing and someone else's, how, in short to
position herself in an academic discussion" (p. 180). This problem
was not simply one of writing ability but one of conceptualizing the
rhetorical purpose of textual borrowing.
One of the goals for using blogs was to help students learn to
"weave" their own ideas with the source texts. Abdullah does
not seem to have such a problem. In this blog entry, he writes about his
evaluation of three online paper mill sites where students can download
papers.
I visit all the three websites. I deeply look spark notes and
cheat house. The similarities for both are, they teach you how
to do easy work and get A' to not stress out and that we call
plagiarism because you using their ideas. Spark notes mention
in there website they provide study guide and that is not bad
idea. They provide most of the subjects and I looked up the
math and chemistry parts. They gave us the summery of the books.
Some way it good idea and the other way it is plagiarism. The
good way for example, the math part when you look up the formulas
if you forget how to do the problems and that is helpful. I do
not thing that is plagiarism. But when you use this websites as
your second teach that is plagiarism.
Abdullah begins his blog with a summary of the site and then argues
that the site could be useful for certain purposes but also that its use
might result in accusations of plagiarism and then goes on to explain
his reasoning. In these first two blogs, Abdullah demonstrates a variety
of discourses. As Gee (1996) has argued, it is critical for students to
go beyond their own primary discourses and for teachers to provide
scaffolding for their attempts. Abdullah demonstrates here an ability to
"weave" the texts he had read with his own ideas, which could
serve him well for meeting the course goals for academic writing. The
problem, however, as Blanton (2005) found, is whether students such as
Abdullah can transfer their strategies from an oral form of discourse to
a more academic form.
Entering the Public Sphere as part of the Writing Process
The approach we used in the course was based on research on how
knowledge is created in a social context and how the writing process
reflects this knowledge creation process (Olson, 1999), which has been
called an "invisible college" by Crane (1972). Latour (1988)
has argued that the formal academic paper can be seen as the
manifestation of this social process. Blogs are forms of software that
can help create social communities where both readers and writers can
interact. Blogs can reflect the writer's engagement with herself
and with a community (Efimova & de Moor, 2005). The technology of
blogging, such as the ability of blogs to be commented on by the reader
as well as aggregated together so that the reader is notified whenever a
blog she is interested in is updated, has contributed greatly to the
complex ways in which readers and writers interact in the blogosphere.
Chesher (2005) argues that the ability of the reader to interact with
the writer in these different ways transforms and enhances the position
of the author.
In academic writing, authors must play powerful roles in
establishing the truth and the significance of their claims. As Latour
(1988) has pointed out, academic writers often critique the previous
literature in order to establish a basis for their own research and in
order to support their claims. In the past, we had found that students
had a great deal of trouble taking such critical positions. However, our
previous research has shown that students often expressed critical ideas
in more depth in their blogs, as well as in other forms of online
discourse, than they did in their classroom assignments (Bloch &
Crosby, 2006; Bloch & Panferov, 2003). Being able to take such
positions was especially important in discussing an issue as
controversial as plagiarism. Howard (1999) has argued that definitions
of plagiarism are often vague and contradictory. However, students often
receive only a brief warning at the beginning of the course. In their
readings for the course, the students encounter various, and often
contradictory, definitions of plagiarism and policies regarding
punishment. In the course writing assignments, the students are expected
to write about their opinions on these definitions and policies.
Abdullah, like many of the other students in the class, did not feel
that there was a necessity for a radical change in policy regarding
plagiarism.
Students have a responsibility while they write their essay.
It means if some students use another's words or ideas without
a reference or permission, they must be taken punishment for
their fault. Therefore, students must honest, and teachers have
a responsibility for keeping the students' honest. Teachers
believe their all students are honest, but in reality, it is
always not. So, teachers watch students whether they are honest
or not for their academic essay. As a science technology is
growing, for example, Internet is very helpful for students.
Students can get knowledge from Internet about what they don't
know. It is very easy. Just drag, copy, and then paste it on
your screen.
Abdullah believed that there needed to be some kind of university
policy regarding plagiarism because, as he put it, not all students are
honest and plagiarism has become easier. His argument was consistent
with what most of the students had written about the university policy.
As they weighed the consequences of each story they read, many indicated
a need for a more nuanced approach depending on differences in the
backgrounds of those accused of plagiarism and the nature of the act of
plagiarism they committed.
It was critical for achieving this type of open discussion to
stimulate a more interactive atmosphere in which the writer's
opinions were considered as valuable as those expressed in the texts
they had read. These types of interactions often necessitate taking a
critical view of what others have already written, which might be
difficult for students in a face-to-face classroom discussion though not
in online written discussions.
In order to foster such a discussion, the students were asked to
respond directly to blog entries they disagreed with. In this blog,
Abdullah directly responded to a classmate's blog about whether the
high school student in the story they had read should have been
expelled. (3)
I disagree with Shimpei.
What do you mean she deserve expelled. In your assignment
you mention you have strong reason that Haley should
expelled from school. You gave some example but not
enough. Before you think she should expel from school I
should suggest that, you but yourself in that situation.
If you did so, you should not said she deserve her punishment.
Abdullah's blog entry demonstrates a facility with not only
critically evaluating his classmate's opinion but also giving
support to his argument. His strategy for expressing his disagreement
was to first evaluate the weakness of the argument and then give a
counter argument, which was what we hoped he could also do in his
classroom writing.
The blog entries also provided insight into the social context to
support this interactivity. In this entry, Abdullah reflects on the
process of reading his classmates' blogs.
First of all, I had to read all of the blogs because I need
to response each writing. It took long time to understand each
student's idea because I had to read from first week's blogs to
present blogs. Moreover, I had to divide whose writing agrees
with my idea or disagree. Almost all classmates' ideas disagreed
with my idea and I had to explain why I disagree with them. Many
classmates thought academic plagiarism must be punished, but I
thought the punishment like expulsion is not the best way for
academic life of students. So, sometimes I had confused whether
I got a wrong idea because I got a different idea than other
classmates. In the some of writings, I was confused what they
wanted to say, so I read their blogs deeply.
The fact that the blog entries were posted online and the students
could read them at their leisure may have been a major factor in
creating a critical dialogue that would not necessarily have been
accomplished in the classroom. This kind of self-reflection could be
helpful in the transfer between the blog and the classroom assignment.
Gee (1996) argues that the ability to move from acquisition, which is
subconscious, to learning, which is conscious, requires the student to
develop a certain level of meta-knowledge about the task, which these
students are struggling with. The blogs also provided the teachers with
insight into the kinds of rhetorical strategies that could be
transferred into the classroom. In individual tutorials with the
students, teachers could indicate aspects of the blogs that the student
could use in the academic paper.
In this blog entry, Abdullah reflects on how he was able to situate
his own ideas about the appropriate punishment for plagiarism within the
context of his classmates' opinions. There is evidence in his blog
of the kinds of rhetorical skills in developing an argument we felt
necessary for his classroom-based academic writing assignments. First,
there is an ability to synthesize the opinions he agrees or disagrees
with, and, second, to cite, at least informally, the other
students' opinions and respond critically to them. Even the
confusion the student expresses is useful for both the student and his
teacher to understand the kinds of problems the students are having with
their reading of the texts and how that confusion could relate to
one's writing.
Creating Texts with Blogs
Along with developing their own ideas, one of the main goals of the
course was to have students understand the rhetorical power of citing
texts, in part so students would not think that the only reason for
citation was to identify the author. This goal was crucial both for
helping students develop their academic writing and to help them develop
a deeper understanding of plagiarism. Students often seem to feel that
claiming ownership to ideas, even if they are not their own, is an
important rhetorical strategy for expressing their opinions.
Unfortunately, this strategy sometimes can result in accusations of
plagiarism. However, as Latour (1988) has argued, the opposite is often
the case in academic writing. Writers frequently cite texts to show that
others have already discussed the topic or to support their own claims.
Disagreements with other authors must be accounted for and neutralized
in order to establish the validity of one's own claims.
In order to give students the opportunity to work with a variety of
different opinions regarding plagiarism, blogging was used to create a
large pool of texts that the students could discuss in their papers. The
students were required to cite their classmates using the same
rhetorical strategies they used for citing the texts they had read in
class. Although Coffin and Hewings (2005) express concern whether this
approach to using online discourse may confuse students about the
concept of authority, we wanted students to become more creative
participants in the discussion of plagiarism by having them create texts
that could be cited by classmates in such a way that each student's
own ideas could be valued as much as those in the texts they were
reading. Students are often taught implicitly or explicitly that their
forms of English, as well as their ideas, are "inferior" to
the standard forms of English used in the academy. This sense of
inferiority can have a negative influence on the students' sense of
self as well as their ability to learn the target language (Kubota,
1998). Changing their attitudes towards their own and their
classmates' writing may help them in developing their writing
skills. As Canagarajah (1999) has argued, it is crucial for the language
learning process that the students' own languages, both their first
and second, be valued even when they diverge from standard forms.
In order to give texts this kind of value, it was necessary for the
students to gain some expertise in what they were writing about. By
reading a number of articles on plagiarism and then writing and
publishing their own texts on the topic, the students were developing an
expertise about plagiarism that went far beyond the five-minute
orientation they had received from the university. Having this expertise
would also free them from having to write only on topics they knew
about, as lacking expertise in an area may precisely cause a student to
plagiarize (e.g., Rose, 1989). Having this knowledge could also help
them avoid the trap L2 students often fall into of having to plagiarize
because they feel they have nothing to say. By giving them a wealth of
background on the topic in the form of student-generated blog entries,
information that would be difficult to plagiarize from external sources,
students had one means of avoiding having to plagiarize to complete the
assignment.
It was also hoped that thinking about the textuality of blogging
would help them achieve another level of metacognition about how the
blogging and classroom assignments were related. This metacognition
often involved knowing what one could transfer directly from the blog to
the classroom assignment. One way to facilitate the transfer between the
blog and the paper was to encourage students to recognize that what they
had written in their blogs could also be used in their classroom
assignments. Seeing such a connection between the types of writing can
help them see how their writing in one context can also be used in
another. Students often seem to feel that these writing environments are
not related to each other, even though they were using similar
rhetorical strategies in both. Therefore, to facilitate this process of
transfer, we asked them to simply cut and paste ideas from the blog into
the paper. Ironically, they had read an article warning them about the
consequences of cutting and pasting from the Internet (e.g., Heaton,
2003); however, we felt that this act of cutting and pasting and then
synthesizing what they had written was potentially useful for helping
them develop their ideas in classroom assignments.
Another way teachers helped students make the connection between
the blogs and the papers explicit was to focus on developing the
conclusions of their papers, where students were expected to express
their own opinions. By having them connect the blog to the paper, it was
hoped that students would gain a degree of metacognition about the
relationship between what they had written in these two spaces. Although
cutting and pasting is obviously a lower level skill that may not
suffice when they were faced with similar writing assignments in other
courses, this approach could lay the basis for a better understanding of
the connection between the two contexts.
CONCLUSION
This paper has attempted to explore how blogging can be used in a
L2 composition classroom. The paper is not meant to present an
ethnographic study of Abdullah but rather an examination of what can be
observed from his blogs about how he is negotiating meaning among
various forms of literacy. Nor is this research an attempt to examine
the totality of one student's literacy development. Rather it is
limited to an analysis of how one writer blogged in a specific
rhetorical context, that of an academic writing class.
I can only present a brief analysis of whether our approach was
successful in helping Abdullah achieve the goals of the course. Overall,
Abdullah progressed well through the course, particularly in his
development of rhetorical strategies. However, there is less evidence
that the blogging helped him with aspects of his writing such as
grammatical control. Future research needs to examine more thoroughly
the relationship between blogging and the development of academic
writing ability.
Judging the overall usefulness of blogs in this context was also
affected by the particular methodology used to implement them. By
purposefully telling the students not to worry about grammar and
spelling, for example, we deemphasized the development of these aspects
of academic literacy in favor of a focus on more macro level features of
rhetorical development.
While blogging was still a classroom assignment, we felt that our
implementation of blogging could foster the same kinds of discussions
found in the blogosphere. In her discussion of Generation 1.5 students,
Blanton (2005) recommends drawing upon the students' oral language
to discuss the same topic they will write about. We tried to accomplish
this by allowing students to write their blogs in an informal manner
without concern for grammatical correctness. The result was that, at
least for the duration of the course, Abdullah, along with his
classmates, became bloggers who were contributing to the development of
ideas in the blogosphere, even if they had only a small audience. Even
in an academic writing class, allowing space for alternative forms of
literacy can help students reconceptualize themselves as writers.
However, it is clear that by becoming bloggers, they increased the
amount of time they spent writing, reading, and generating ideas as well
as demonstrating a variety of complex rhetorical strategies. For
students whose literacy, to use Blanton's term, has been
"interrupted," this use of blogging can be a valuable
pedagogical tool.
The use of blogging with this student, as with the use of any other
technology, cannot be understood or evaluated outside of the context in
which it was used. It was important for our understanding of blogging
that we examine its usage in a specific rhetorical context with a
specific type of student. In making these observations, I have tried to
speculate on how the blogs may or may not facilitate his development of
a narrowly defined set of rhetorical goals that are common to academic
writing. At the same time, the "orality" of the discourse of
these students (Blanton, 2005; Harklau et al., 1997; Reid, 1997), raises
interesting questions about whether these students can use blogs in ways
that differ from students who have more experience with print literacy.
While the use of blogging discussed in this paper can tell us something
about the pedagogical value of blogging, the results are not
generalizable to other rhetorical contexts with other types of students.
Despite this caveat, there were some areas of composition pedagogy
where blogging is potentially useful. As Lowe and Williams (2004) have
argued, blogging can facilitate an interactive means for creating
knowledge, which we hoped could later be transferred into
classroom-based writing assignments. Abdullah's blog entries
allowed him to publicly participate with his classmates in the process
of knowledge construction. By making this process public, his classmates
could share in how he was creating knowledge, and his teachers could
better understand the strategies he was attempting to use.
These findings raise a number of pedagogical questions about the
role of blogging in a composition classroom. Teachers often ask the
question: "What do we do with blogs?" What we have tried to
show is that the question should be reversed to be "What problem do
we have that blogging might be the solution for?" We can see in the
blogs evidence of Abdullah's ability to fulfill some of the goals
of the course, including developing an "expertise" in the
topic and displaying a variety of rhetorical strategies that could be
transferred into his classroom assignments.
There are many other issues with blogging that also need to be
addressed. Is blogging a unique form of discourse or only another form
of asynchronous discourse? Does blogging really encourage interaction or
is it a monologic form that does not foster the same kinds of
interaction that other forms of online discourse do (e.g., Krause,
2005). If blogging is to remain an important technology inside the
composition classroom, these issues will have to be explored further.
Blogs, however, are more than tools; blogging is also a form of
literacy in itself, which can be valued as what Heath (1983) called a
"literacy act." While there is evidence that there may be
important differences in the nature of literacy and authorship than is
found in other forms of print and online discourse, the relationship
between these forms of discourse is not clear. For now, having students
blog in class is a pedagogy that can be useful in the development of
their writing ability while making them contributors and not just
consumers of information on the World Wide Web.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers, Rick Kern, Hunter
Hatfield, and Cathryn Crosby for help with this article.
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