Video Blogging in EFL/ESL Classrooms: Challenges, Options and Opportunities Ke Xu Borough of Manhattan Community College City University of New York I. Challenges to Video blogging in EFL/ESL classrooms • Students’ lack of vocabulary and linguistic competence in the actual use of the target language prevents them from freely expressing themselves orally in another language; • Students’ inability to respond to their peer’s blogs due to their lack of language competence, background knowledge or cultural difference; • Students’ lack of sustained interest in Vblogging in another language and the temptation to fall back on their first language is too great; • Teachers’ lack of knowledge about where they can make best use of video blogging in their teaching and how to integrate video blogging into their curriculum; • Lack of sustained support from tech experts, or a good coordination between the teaching and tech support forces • Lack of funding resources for equipments II. In What Ways Can Video Blogging Benefit EFL/ESL Teaching? EFL/ESLTeachers may find many ways in which a Vblog can be beneficial to their teaching. They don’t have to be technically savvy — a basic consumer camcorder, or even a digital camera with video recording function and an SDHC memory card, and a computer with free editing software and an internet connection are all you need. By assigning recording and editing duties to students, you’ll also be teaching them technical skills and reducing your own work burden for the Vblog! Vblogs can be used to • Present new learning materials • Illustrate, clarify or explain concepts, ideas and points of views • Reinforce and consolidate learning by helping students review the content they have learnt before • Conduct peer editing in pairs or group activities (by asking students to comment on each other’s video clips) • Provide visual prompts for students’ group/class discussion • Assess students’ listening comprehension, conversation skills, pronunciation, stress, and intonation • Increase students’ awareness of pronunciation, intonation, stress, etc. • Form student online learning community so that they can share their experience and help each other • Sharpen students’ observation and critical thinking skills • Promote collaborate learning by asking students to create and fulfill group projects • Enable teachers to better understand their students • Motivate students to open up their month and promote their oral presentation skills and conversation skills • Motivate or enlist students’ interest in learning the target language and related culture • Document and track teachers’ work so that they could reflect on their own work later • Share ideas and thoughts with fellow teachers and researchers III. Teachers’ Options in Successfully Meeting the Challenges To successfully meet the challenges listed above, here are a few possible options for teachers’ consideration: • Screen carefully the vocabulary and grammatical items to be used in the video clips and make sure the difficulty level of the clip does not exceeds students’ comprehension ability; Identifying words and phrases in the video clip students may not understand due to their low proficiency or lack of knowledge of the culture related to the target language, and scaffolding your teaching by supplying these words and phrases before hand in supplementary readings or exercises; • Teach your students how to respect other people’s work and make positive comments on their fellow students’ blogs by taking them to visit some best-known educational blog sites or student blog sites, by modeling to your students how to make a comment step by step. If you are teaching beginning level students, you need to teach them the specific words and phrases they may need in commenting on others’ blogs; • Create

1. Video Blogging in EFL/ESL Classrooms: Challenges, Options and Opportunities Ke Xu Borough of Manhattan Community College City University of New York

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