The present study aimed to investigate how blogs mediated EFL teachers to enhance their professional development. A case study approach was adopted to gain a comprehensive understanding of the participants’ blogging process. This chapter begins with an introduction of the study settings and the process of selecting
participants for the current research. Then, a description of data collecting process is presented. Finally, I will discuss the methodology for data analysis.
Study Setting
In the past two decades, an increasing number of blogging websites (e.g. Wretch, Yam, PIXNET )1 has appeared in Taiwan and has gained much attention. Except for some slight differences in the interface, these blogging websites all provide basic functions: providing a virtual space for users to keep electronic blog entries
accompanied with photographs, pictures, and videos. Among these blogging websites,
“Wretch” is one of the most commonly used websites in Taiwan. Wretch offers bloggers various functions including electronic albums, online diaries, and message board, etc. After registering an account, everyone can easily be a blogger for free in Wretch. However, to gain the full service such as an enlarged space for virtual
diaries/albums/message board, bloggers have to be charged for advanced membership (refer to the website for detailed information).
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1 The URL link of Wretch, Yam, and PIXNET: Wretch http://www.wretch.cc/ ; Yam http://blog.yam.com/ ; PIXNET http://www.pixnet.net/
Up to the data collection, the website has attracted millions of users. A lot of English teachers have launched blogs and recorded their teaching in the websites.
Thus, the current study targeted at the website to recruit potential participants. Figures 3.1 provides an example of the interface of blogs in Wretch.
Figure 3.1 The Interface of Blogs in Wretch
The Recruitment of Participants
To recruit appropriate participants for examining how blogs mediated English teachers development, three main criteria were applied to select the potential participants. First, the host of the blog should be an English teacher regardless the level he/she teaches (e.g. kindergartens, elementary school, high schools, universities, or cram schools). Second, in each of the selected blogs, there should be over fifty entries related to English teaching. According to Chang (2007), “fifty entries” was set as the preliminary selecting criterion of recruitment to ensure that there were enough
entries for analysis and that the bloggers really devoted some time to keeping entries.
Following Chang’s criterion, I looked for blogs which meet the requirement. Finally, the bloggers must keep blog entries regularly and continuously. Here, “regularly” is defined as regularly posting certain amount of entries each month (e.g. 4 entries a month) and “continuously” refers to continuously posting blogging for a period of time (at least a year). As Baily (1990) noted, regular and candid entries documented in a personal journal are the best way to record teaching experiences. A regular and continuum record of blog entries may help to extensively and completely examine the development of our target bloggers through observing his/her blogging.
According to the three criteria, I searched for qualified blogs in the targeted blogging website, Wretch. However, while there were a lot of English teacher blogs, only few met all of our criteria. I contacted with hosts of the blogs, inviting them to participate in the current research. As a result, two English teachers, Wu and Lin were recruited. Both Wu and Lin signed a consent form, being the study participants.
Wu and Lin were both female Taiwanese English teachers. At the time of dada collection, they had been bloggers for four years and were continuing posting blog entries. Table 3.1 shows a brief introduction of the participants’ demographic information.
Table 3.1
The Participants’ Demographic Information
Wu Lin
Gender Female Female
Age Late 20s Early 30s
Nationality Taiwanese Taiwanese
Education A bachelor degree of Foreign Language
A master degree of TESOL from Taiwan Type of School Taught Elementary school Vocational high school Teaching Experiences 4 years 9 years
Years of Blogging 4 years in Wretch 1.5 years in Yam 2.5 years in Wretch
Note: Lin worked for 8 years in formal schools, 1year in cram schools
Wu: A Descriptive Portfolio
Wu was an elementary English teacher at her late 20s. She held a bachelor degree in foreign language and received training from the Center of Teacher Education when studying in college. As she graduated, Wu started her career as an elementary school teacher and had been teaching for four years.
Originally, Wu did not intend to be a teacher. However, she met an influential teacher who aroused her enthusiasm of teaching. In her freshman year of the college, Wu took a course offered by a professor who made a professional specialty in second language teaching and learning. According to Wu, the professor noticed that Wu had some unique personal characteristics which might make her a good teacher and provided her opportunities to try. During summer and winter vacations the professor invited Wu to take part in English camps held for children in rural and remote areas.
Therefore, in addition to simply learning theories from text books, Wu also accumulated a lot of practical experiences.
After graduation, Wu began to teach in an elementary school in northern Taiwan.
For Wu, the first year of teaching was really challenging. Wu was assigned to be both
a homeroom teacher in a first-grade class and an English teacher in an affiliated kindergarten of the school. Being a novice teacher, Wu did not exactly know how to handle those kids. She spent a lot of time exploring learning materials to attract her students’ attention and make them concentrate in classes. At the same time, Wu began to take advantages of blogs to record teaching resources she found. Wu reported that, in this way, her blog could be a rich and useful reference for her teaching. As time goes by, Wu gradually got more and more familiar with her job. After two years in the school, Wu asked for transferring to another school due to a health problem. For Wu, transferring to another school meant she had to face a new working environment and new challenges. In her blog entries, Wu first expressed her anxiety of teaching in a new school. Nevertheless, Wu later reported she met many kind colleagues who were always willing to help her. Soon, Wu got used to her life at the new school. While sometimes there were still difficulties, with Wu’s previous teaching experiences and the help of her colleagues, she continued to enjoy her teaching and serve as a devoted teacher.
Wu’s Blog
Before data collection, Wu had kept blogging for four years. She launched a blog in the website, Wretch, simply because Wretch was the most popular blogging website at the time. Figure 3.2 and 3.3 presents an overview of Wu’s blog.
Figure 3.2 Wu’s Blog: The Homepage
Figure 3.3 Wu’s Blog: Entries Related to Teaching
In her previous blogging experiences, Wu took blogs as a tool for recording her daily life and personal feelings. As Figure 3.4 indicates, compared with teachers who simply used blogs for English teaching and learning, Wu’s blog included a wider range of topics from teaching, traveling, personal reflection on daily life to music and food. At the time of data collection, there were over 1,400 entries in Wu’s blog and Wu continued regularly posting four or five entries related to teaching and learning every month. Among Wu’s classifications of her blog entries, three of them especially related to teaching and learning (teaching diaries, pre-service teaching diaries, and lesson plan examples).
Figure 3.4 Wu’s Blog: Wu’s Classification of Entries
Lin: A Descriptive Portfolio
Lin was a non-native vocational high school English teacher. She held a mater degree in TESOL. Before teaching at the vocational high school, Lin had worked in a cram school and a junior high school. At the time of data collection, Lin has been an English teacher for nine years. After being a teacher, Lin realized that it was important for teachers to constantly enhance their abilities. Thus, she applied for an in-service master program in a college in northern Taiwan and received her master’s degree of TESOL in 2008.
Lin majored in foreign language and started her career as a junior high English teacher. Gradually Lin found that she did not enjoy her teaching in junior high school because it always took her a lot of time to manage students’ behaviors in class.
Therefore, she decided to prepare for High School Teacher Admission and then was provided an opportunity to work in a vocational high school.
Being a vocational high school teacher was totally different from being a junior high school. At first Lin kept applying many learning activities and games to stimulate students’ participation. Soon she realized it did not do much help for senior high students who might need extensive reading and a larger amount of grammar knowledge. Moreover, teaching in a vocational high school was not as easy as Lin thought. The school administrators especially put emphasis on Applied Foreign Language Department and required students of the department to have an annual English performance. Thus, in addition to preparing for classes, English teachers had to invest a lot of time and efforts on assisting students to do the performance. While suffering from pressure, Lin felt that teaching was more enjoyable now than before since she could finally put what she had learned before into practice. She thought she was really delivering knowledge to students instead of doing class management.
Being a teacher, Lin had always wanted to create an English learning website
which involved many interesting learning materials for learners and useful resources for teachers. However, she soon found that it was not an easy job to set and manage a website since she was not quite familiar with the related computer skills. As she learned to use blogs, Lin considered the interface of blogs was convenient as well as friendly for users even if they did not know much about designing a website. As a result, Lin decided to launch a blog to share information concerned with teaching and learning with others.
Lin’s Blog
At the time of data collection, Lin has been keeping writing blog entries for over four years. Originally, Lin had a blog in the blogging website, Yam. When she studied in the in-service master program, Lin thought blogs might be a fresh and interesting topic for her thesis and decided to conduct research on blogging and English learning.
Lin found most of her students preferred the interface of Wretch and thus Lin herself also set up an account in Wretch and started to keep entries in the website. Lin’s blog entries in Yam were not accessible. Thus, the current study only includes Lin’s entries in Wretch. Figure 3.5 and 3.6 present an overview of Lin’s blog in Wretch.
Figure 3.5 Lin’s blog: The Home Page and Entries Related to Teaching
Figure 3.6 Lin’s Blog: Lin’s Classification of Entries
As shown in Figure 3.6, Lin classified her entries into several themes and most of them were related to English teaching and learning. In addition to keeping teaching diaries, Lin provided learning materials, including English writing as well as thesis writing and shared her experiences of participating English speech contests as well as High School Teacher Admission tests. Lin regularly wrote five or six entries related to teaching and learning every month. Totally there were 252 entries in Lin’s blog at the time of data collection with 197 of them concerned with teaching and learning.
Data Collection Data Sources
Borg (2006) indicates that reflective writing, observation, and verbal
commentaries are effective ways to study teacher cognition and beliefs. According to Borg, first, reflective writing aims to elicit teachers’ perceptions of their experiences and beliefs concerned with language teaching through writing tasks. Second, the goal of observation is to collect real or simulate planning and teaching, and then compared them to stated cognitions. Third, verbal commentary is to elicit verbal commentaries about teachers’ beliefs, attitudes, practical theories and related mental constructs through interviews, stimulated recall or think-aloud protocols. To examine the target teachers’ development through blogging, the present study adopted Borg’s
suggestions, collecting data from blog entries, regular online observations and two interviews. In the following, detailed descriptions for each of the data sources in the present study are provided.
Blog Writing
Within each blog, there were electronic entries kept by the bloggers. In the current research, all of the entries in the selected blogs were first collected. After reviewing all of the entries, the parts related to the participants’ feelings and reflections of teaching were particularly noted and taken as sources of the teachers’ reflective writing.
Online observation
I read the participants’ recently posted blog entries on a weekly basis and kept research logs. In my research logs, I recorded every notable phenomena as well as my reflection. Here are some examples shown in my research logs.
When reading entries related to Wu’s anxiety of being a teacher, I recorded,
I know there must be a lot of struggles for a beginning teacher and I would like to know what the most challenging thing was for Wu at that time and how she tried to overcome it. Moreover, I am also interested in that during the struggling process, whether keeping blog entries provided her any help or not. If not, why was Wu willing to continuously keep entries? (2009/06/17)
Also, observing Wu’s interaction with others on the internet, I wrote in my researcher’s log:
Aside from continuing to record her teaching process, Wu also constantly played games with her readers and offered her worksheets as prizes. What inspired Wu to interact with others in this way? (2009/07/14)
In another log, I noted,
Recently, Wu usually expressed her negative feelings. However, at the end of each entry, she always cheered herself up. I am wondering if Wu would consider about others’ feelings when reading the entries and thus she purposely presented a positive image. (2009/08/02)
What I recorded in research logs were complied and became the base of interview questions.
Interviews
Two face-to-face interviews with semi-structured questions were conducted for each participant to elicit their commentaries on their blogging experiences. The first interview was mainly with the three goals:
1. Gain an in-depth understanding of the participants’ subject agency, including their personal background and teaching/learning experiences
2. Understand the participants’ attitude toward teaching and blogging including the motives encouraged them to keep blog entries as well as their expectations on their blogs and their goals of teaching, etc.
3. Clarify specific phenomena uncovered by me during the analysis of the participants’ blog writing and recorded in research logs, comparing the
participants’ stated cognition of teaching with what I had noted during online observing process (see Appendix B for interview guides).
The second interview was conducted several months later as a follow-up interview to trace if there were any changes of the participants’ blogging behaviors and
perceptions of blogging. All the interviews were audio taped and later transcribed.
The next section gives an introduction of the exact time arrangement and data collecting procedure.
Data Collecting Procedure
For data collection, I first collected the participants’ blog entries and carefully examined their blog writing to gain an initial understanding of the participants. While examining the participants’ blog entries, I did weekly online observation and kept a research log. After collecting data from blog writing and online observing,
face-to-face interviews were conducted for each participant individually to elicit their verbal commentaries for later analysis. Table 3.2 presents the timeline of data
collecting procedure.
As shown in Table 3.2, in both cases, I spent three months to collect and review the participants’ blog entries while doing online observation. Then, I conducted the first interview. Originally, I expected to conduct the second interview for each of the two participants two or three months later after the first interview. However, Wu was extremely busy and unavailable in the second half 2009 and thus the second interview for Wu was postponed to March, 2010.
Table 3.2
Data collecting procedure
Participant/ Data Collection Wu Lin
Collection and review of blog entries
2009/5-2009/7 2009/12-2010/2
Online observation 2009/5-2009/7 2009/12-2010/2
The 1st Interview 2009/08/19 2010/02/27
The 2ed Interview 2010/03/18 2010/04/19
Data Analysis
Analysis of Blog Entries
The current study took a case study approach and reported two cases of English teachers’ blogging experiences to explore how blogs may mediate English teachers’
development. To investigate how blogs may mediate English teachers’ development, it is essential to examine what the participants wrote about in their blogs.
At first, I examined the participants’ blog entries, taking the participants’ own classification of entries as a reference and briefly divided the entries into two
categories, namely, teaching and learning related as well as daily life related. The step aimed to separate entries concerned with teaching and learning from other entries for later analysis. Specific descriptions of the two categories are provided as the follows.
1. Teaching and Learning Related: The category included all of the entries related to teaching and learning. Teaching diaries, learning resources, skills, and ideas sharing, and demonstration of students’ work were all included in the category.
For example, while fourteen of Lin’s entries were categorized by Lin as “Daily Journal,” in the current study, they were regarded as “Teaching and Learning Related” since they are all concerned with events that happened between Lin and
her students.
2. Daily Life Related: The category included special events in the participants’ daily life, the participants’ life experiences, and their feelings. For instance, an entry concerned with taking pictures with a new camera or an entry describing the experience enjoying delicious food was categorized in the category. In addition, entries in which the participants revealed their thoughts of friendship and love were also included in this category.
Next, to identify which practice the participants engaged in during the blogging process, entries related to teaching and learning were coded according to
the six “empirically grounded practices framed by Luehmann (2008), namely,
awareness and consideration of personal educational autobiography(P1), engagement in critical inquiry-based reflection(P2), engagement in community-based
interactions(P3), studying practice in a way that is connected to, yet removed from, content-specific daily practice(P4), consideration and integration of an expert
voice(P5), and engagement in thoughtful, intentional professional practice over a long term and in sustained ways(P6). However, among the six practices, engagement in thoughtful, intentional professional practices over a long term and in sustained ways (P6), which refers to engage in long-term professional and thoughtful work for substantial periods of time and in sustained ways, was suggested to be related to each of the other five practices in blogging. After analyzing an urban teacher’s blog, Luehmann (2008) reported that activities in blogging all represented strong examples of long-term engagement in varied types of professional work. In the current study, blogging itself was a long-term and substantial activity for the participants and thus there was no need to set an independent code for P6. Thus, only the other five
voice(P5), and engagement in thoughtful, intentional professional practice over a long term and in sustained ways(P6). However, among the six practices, engagement in thoughtful, intentional professional practices over a long term and in sustained ways (P6), which refers to engage in long-term professional and thoughtful work for substantial periods of time and in sustained ways, was suggested to be related to each of the other five practices in blogging. After analyzing an urban teacher’s blog, Luehmann (2008) reported that activities in blogging all represented strong examples of long-term engagement in varied types of professional work. In the current study, blogging itself was a long-term and substantial activity for the participants and thus there was no need to set an independent code for P6. Thus, only the other five