BlOgGiNg.........

Blogging and trainee teachers’ professional development

Blogging or writing of e-journals is a reasonably new phenomenon. Even teachers trainee, trainee teachers and teacher trainers beginning to understand blogging and the further dimension to this form of journal is making a presence-moblogging or mobile blogging.
A study was carried out on 24 in-service trainee teachers. First to provide the trainee teachers a first hand experience of using computer-mediated applications as part of their professional development and to boost up their confident. Second, to provide the trainee teachers experience of reflecting on their reading of dramatic texts.
Warschauer and Healey (1998), state that “the rise of computer-mediated communications and the internet have reshaped the uses of computers for language learning at the end of 20th century”. It also features the time-place independence. For the purpose of this study, professional development is described as “the process of reflection, examination and change, which leads to better job performance and to personal and professional growth.
Blogging has brought interest in learners to write. Typically updated daily blogs often reflect the personality of the author. Studies indicate that teacher trainees enjoy blogging and found to be useful by their instructors. Some found blogging easy and recommended it for future use. Journal and journaling is applicable to blogs and blogging. Journaling may facilitate reflective practice the mere act of writing entries. Journal is an important means of gathering information.
There is indeed much literature in the field of reflection in relation to professional development. There is a close link between reflection and thinking and not just recalling. Two significant works on the types of reflection are provided.



Advantages of blogging

· So far as I may concern, I feel that blogging gives advantages to
both the writer of the blog and their readers.
· Blogging allows the writer to write what they want to write. Its
Like letting your emotions and feelings to flow.
· There is no one who’s going to judge what you have written.
· The whole world or probably half of the world will read your blog
Disadvantages of blogging

· Although there will no one to judge our writings, but we will be surprised with comments we’ll receive from readers
· Good comments are an encouragement for us. It will make us fell want to write and post more blogs.
· Bad comment is a discouragement. It maybe will make us to stop writing blogs. If we able to take the bad comments as a challenge, we’ll try our best to write better and improve our skills.



MY EXPERIENCE

· When I was first given the task to prepare a blog, I went WHAT. I really don’t understand what blog is. Maybe now I have learned to understand but yet I still face some problems occur whenever I tried to post my blog.
· I have to learn how to write in a proper way (since this is one of my course assignments).Although I have gone through nearly three blogs, I still know that my writing skill is not that good.
· What ever I’m doing now is what I feel about my course. I’m happy when my blogs were post. I gain a complete satisfaction.

BEYOND CONCORDANCE LINES: USING CONCORDANCES TO INVESTIGATE LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT.

Concordance software such as Wordsmith, MonoConc Pro and Microconcord help in the tedious task of analyzing language data and greatly extend the potential of a corpus in language pedagogy. It helps to examine concordance lines to discover how words and grammatical constructions are used. This articles investigates language development based on data in the EMAS corpus using language production as well as lexical variety as indicators of development. The EMAS corpus was collected in 2002 and consist of close to half a million words. It is an untagged and unedited learner corpus that contains written data by about 800 students, from Year 5 (primary school) ,as well as Form 1 and Form 4 (secondary school) and they are considered as being above average in English language profiency. The major criterion in selecting the topics for the essays was the amount of the language the topic could elicit. To elicit a large amount of language data, “the happiest day of my life” topic was used for one of the essays as almost every respondent was thought to be able to write on the topic and hence produced the required amount of language data. Numerous language acquisition studies, for example, focus on specific target structures and examine the acquisition of these structures over a period of time. Available data in the EMAS corpus is cross sectional and elicited from three groups. Therefore, a basic assumption made in this article is that developmental patterns can be implied by comparing the language use of three different age groups. Productivity in this article is indicated by the number of sentences per essay and the words per sentence. We can detect a gradual increase in the number of sentence, sentences per essay and words per sentence from the primary 5 to form 4 level based on the information from the studies. The diversity of the vocabulary used in the corpus is often determined by calculating the type to token ratio and it is calculated by dividing the number of separate words in a text by the number of words in the text. Type to token ratio gradually increases from the lower to the higher age groups this signifies that the older respondents use a wider range of vocabulary in their essays. The average amount of type was calculated by first counting the number of words with a frequency higher than or equal to the number of respondents in each age level. In order to estimate the number of types per respondents, this amount were also deducted from the total number of types found before this and the result was divided by the number of respondents for each age group and multiplied by three. The result of this operation was then added to the number of high frequency words found earlier to provide an estimate of the average number of word types per student.

SIMILARITIES AND DIFFERENCES BETWEEN EMAIL, CHAT AND SHORT MESSAGE SERVICE (SMS).

EMAILS.
Email is a computer-to-computer communication system; that allows text-based messages to be exchanged electronically, e.g. between computers or mobile phones. Email requires only selected user and no need to be at their computer. Recipient retrieve their email on their own time. There is salutation in email to greet the receiver compare to SMS. The sender only get their reply when the receiver check their email.

CHAT.
Chat is a conversation between 2 or more people and it requires instant feedback. Chatting also can support up to 20 chatters in one channel. Real online conversation between many computer chatter must be online at the same time. Sometimes chat have different kinds of spelling, depends on the chatters. Chatters can get their answer on the spot there. Chatters also can do their conversations there.

SHORT MESSAGE SERVICE.
SMS stands for Short Message Service system that we have in our mobile. The name itself is short so the message must be short also as its name. User uses their mobile as their main device. Its called short message because the length setting is ljttle.Users use short sentences and words in sms . As example, the user will type ‘u’ for ‘you’.The sms user also can get their feedback quickly unless they didn’t have credit. Compare to email, sms are more to emergency but the user cannot do their conversation. They use it just for pass their information to others. SMS didn’t have salutation like email.