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12 January 2017

POTENTIAL USE OF LANG-8 TO ENHANCE TEACHER AUTONOMY AND STUDENT ENGAGEMENT IN THE WRITING INSTRUCTION

By
Tri Hari Nurdi

            Writing skill is perceived to be a significant skill that students need to develop in their English learning. In this digital era, students who are considered as the digital native generation have their own ways in learning things, especially a foreign language. Meanwhile, some teachers who belong to digital immigrant generation may find difficulties to vary their activities to fit the students’ learning way. Considering this situation, there are some challenges in the teaching and learning of English writing skill: 1) Teachers need to improve their competence to develop good quality of teaching-learning activity for English writing skill, and 2) Students need to be encouraged to foster their engagement during the teaching-learning process of English writing skill.
            In order to face these challenges, using a language exchange social networking site (SNS) can be an alternative method. By using this portal, L2 learners can post their journals and make friends with the English native speakers and other English learners. The active users post their journals, read others’ journals, and give feedbacks to each other. Students will develop their interest and motivation in writing when others read and give feedbacks to their writing. At the same time, students who get more motivation are likely to develop their engagement in the teaching-learning process.
The portal that will be analyzed in this study is lang-8. This study is aimed to analyze the potential use of lang-8 web-based journal in enhancing teacher autonomy and student engagement in the English writing teaching-leaarning process.
Lang-8.com is a language exchange social networking website geared towards language learners. The website is run by Lang-8 Inc., which is based in Tokyo, Japan. Currently, there are over 750,000 users spanning more than 190 countries and 90 languages.
One such community [1] is Lang-8 (www.lang-8.com). The basic idea is that, once you register, you receive a blog that can be used just like any other blog. You can write blog posts, each with a header, a main text (in which you may include links, images, embedded media, etc.) and a field for tags. Just like with ‘free range’ blogs, i.e. blogs maintained for non-educational purposes, blog posts are displayed in reverse chronological order and readers can comment on what has been written. There are a number of ways in which Lang-8 differs from other blogging services though. Firstly, it has an additional tag field, in which bloggers indicate what language their blog post has been written in. This in itself would not be very important if each blog were not part of a bigger blogging community. When you log onto Lang-8, you do not arrive directly at your blog, but at a dashboard that shows a list of the most recent blog posts in your target language(s) and native language(s) and invites you to read them and to comment on them or to correct them.

This is where the second major difference comes into play. In addition to normal comments, readers can easily make grammar corrections on learners’ blog posts. They do not need to copy and paste text from the blog posts since the software provides a copy of the original blog posts to individuals who wish to make a correction. It also provides all the layout features customary for making corrections, such as strike-through, ‘red ink’ and ‘blue ink’.
The community works on the basis of reciprocal feedback. Learners blog in their target language(s) and correct or comment on blog posts of learners of their native language(s).
This mechanism can be helpful for learners who might feel insecure posting ‘imperfect’ texts online. The community is an environment in which one practices one’s language skills, which includes making mistakes and receiving feedback on one’s mistakes. Each ‘teacher’ is, at the same time, a learner. Generally, the atmosphere is very friendly and supportive, even though no formal moderation process is in place. Even fairly crude attempts in a foreign language receive supportive feedback, as the reviewer can attest from her own attempts at blogging in Japanese.
Lang-8 is a free (advertising financed) service. While paid-for accounts also exist, all functions can be used with a free account as well. Importantly, learners can protect their privacy by deciding with whom to share their texts (everybody, only other users, only users one has befriended, nobody).

References
Razaei, A.R. (2010). Using social networks for language learning. In Dodge, D. & Gibson, B. Proceedings of society for information technology & teacher education international conference 2010, Chesapeake, VA: AACE.

Schlickau, S. (2009) Social media in culture hegemony: Pragmatik – Didaktik – Intercultural communication. Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang.

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