How podcasting, delicious, twitter, blogs and wikis can be used with my future Saudi EFL students

     Computer-based communication, particularly internet, has always been a reliable source of authentic language learning. With internet-based applications, students can practice writing whether synchronously (e.g. chatting, instant messaging, and, live discussion boards) or asynchronously (e.g. emails and blogs). The emergence of internet gave writers the chance to release their feelings and voice in many different ways – blogging (blogs or weblogs) is one of these ways. Weblogs are facilities which allow learners to easily maintain content and add new entries and comments, with the advantage of placing videos, graphics, and audio.

     Saudi learners like all EFL learners can benefit greatly from social networks such as twitter and from the blogs and other internet tools. For example, the interactive nature of blogging makes it a textually social environment and integrates EFL writing with real life. Blogging offers opportunities for real communication and practice where students can think, reflect, create language for a real audience, and motivates language learning.

    The function and nature of EFL writing have much to do with blogging. In pedagogical environments, using blogs effectively helps in sharing knowledge beyond the classroom setting. This in turn enhances the individual accountability in learning. Also, blogging has the feature of archiving that makes it easy to keep the learning experiences recorded.

Also, students can be put in online discussions about a topic assigned by the teacher. In a tutor blog, the teacher posts a topic for discussion and each student through his blog can write about this topic and get an immediate feedback from his teacher and his peers. Such interactive issues increases the cultural wealth of the students and expand their vision of the world.

    Also, I can use the text messaging facility to enhance the students’ vocabulary capacity.  In a model task, I can design an activity based on sending messages to students and asking students what the underlined words mean based on their reading of the message. Students in this way get extra words from a contextual experience and their lexical knowledge gets more and more developed.