Abstract:

The goal of this study is to investigate the content of the preparatory year programme (PYP) students’ blog entries, and to track the improvement of their writing once they have spent fourteen weeks blogging in English. A further aim is to gauge their perceptions of affordances of blogging as a tool to learning English as a foreign language in Taif university, Saudi Arabia. In this investigation, two groups of preparatory year programme (PYP) control group and experimental group. Experimental group students studying in Taif university will be selected to take part in a blogging programme lasting for fourteen weeks. During this time, students will create a blog account where they will write about the things they like to share with their peers, such as social commentary, daily activities, sport, fashion etc. The opinions of these students will also be assessed to determine and how participation in the blogging process has affected their attitudes to learning English as a foreign language. Also, the control group students studying in Taif university will be selected to take part in this study, will be instructed by the traditional methods in writing EFL classes. The discoveries of this research have the potential to assist Saudi education policy makers in implementing the best ways to teach English as a foreign language, will provide insights into the potential impact of that a relatively new form of writing, blogging may have on writing development and attitudes to learning, particularly within public educational institutions. The conclusions will give educators and educational researchers sufficient information regarding learning a foreign language using blogging in the context of the Middle Eastern or Arab world, as most of previous research has been made in American, Western, and East Asian environments.

Keywords:

EFL, Educational blogs, Writing Development, Affordances.