Blog #11 E-Journaling

In the article, the researchers had the students record some of their language learning experience through e-journaling. The students were to focus on the strategies that they used in order to complete their assigned speech acts. I think it could be very beneficial for students to think about the different strategies they use when learning, but I don't think it was more beneficial for them to e-journal that information instead of just writing it down. It is nice in a way though that both the researchers and the students have an online resource they can go back and reference. Sometimes paper copies get misplaced or thrown away.

Another way e-journaling could be fun and helpful for EFL students in particular is to give them pen-pals from the states that they can e-mail back and forth. I know they could just do this on paper as well, but e-mailing would save on a lot of postage, the conversations would be quicker so they would have time to write more, and they would always have a saved document of their entire conversation. They could use this to see the progress in their own writing as well as reference things that were mentioned in past conversations.

Blog #7 Writing Correction/Feedback

I thought the Savignon and Chiu article had a lot of good ideas. Most of them could be done with paper as well as online, but were beneficial either way. One idea I thought was particularly helpful and specific to online was the idea of having the students change the highlighted portion to a different color. I know when I was learning a foreign language I would only correct about 95% of the revisions. There were always some that I left, usually because I didn't understand and didn't want to put the effort into figuring it out. I know this sounds slack, but I don't think it's totally uncommon. If I would have had to turn in the next draft with a visual representation pointing to the areas I didn't revise, I would have worked harder to fix everything. As far as which to revise first, form or content, I do think it makes the most sense to focus on content first. In addition to the evidence showing that students do more revisions when content is focused on first, there is also just the practical side of it. If you have a student fix all their content first and then look at their grammar, they only have to revise each portion once. If you have them fix their grammar mistakes though, they are only going to have new ones after they've revised their content. I feel like they would end up doing grammar, and then content, and then grammar again.