Spanish and French foreign learners’ blogging experience: Motivation and attitude

Monash University Marisa.Cordella@monash.edu This study makes use of weblogs (blogs) with the specific aim to assist intermediate second language learners of Spanish or French. We investigate the use of individual blogging in 158 Spanish and French learners to understand students’ motivation and attitude to blog in the foreign language over the 12 week period of the program. Results show that the rate of motivation fluctuated throughout the course of the project and that students showed a positive attitude towards learning and researching their assigned topics. In addition, some difficulties identified by students at the start of the program improved over time. Exposure to digital media contributes to improving the students’ language experience.


Introduction
The utilization of new technological tools in the teaching of a foreign language has been a well established practice throughout the decades. Currently, the interest focuses on online platforms that facilitate students' engagement with wider social networks (Godwin-Jones, 2008). Blogging is one example of this and it is becoming a promising pedagogical alternative to assist students' writing skills through authentic productions (Pinkman, 2005; Rivens Mompean, 2010; Warschauer, 2010) which are shared and further developed in collaboration with others (Pinkman, 2005;Prichard, 2008;Sun, 2009). The exchange of information and comments with peers has been shown to be beneficial and a motivating factor for language learners (Absalom & De Saint Léger, 2011;Pinkman, 2005;Sun, 2009;Yang & Chang, 2011).
The support on the use of blogging in language teaching stems from the familiarity that most "young" learners exhibit towards this tool. According to Betts and Glogoff there is a tendency: to replace the pedagogical models that have long been entrenched in higher education for models that better engage students in learner-centered applications…[ because] … students who have grown up in the information age with technology have developed skills, aptitudes and attitudes different from many of those active in instruction (2004).
Motivation and engagement in learning has been measured through a quantitative approach, comparing student blog entry word counts throughout the period of the program. In some cases the number of words quadrupled (Fellner & Apple, 2006) providing an indication that students were engaged (Rivens Mompean, 2010) and motivated with the activity. Although the number of words may increase over time, this appears not to be associated with the quality of students' writing skills. According to Lee " like other asynchronous CMC, blogs tend to encourage fluency rather than accuracy" (2010).
We may therefore argue that blogging responds to the digital era in which we are living and that young learners are usually interested to be part of it. As an extension of Web 1.0 and Computer Mediated Communication (CMC), Web 2.0 provides motivating learning environments. For example, blogs and wikis are dynamic and process-oriented, and they also supply the space where "the reader is a potential contributor" (Alm, 2006). Although the driving force in introducing digital media in education is based on the motivation factor, there is not much research done to test whether learners' motivation changes throughout the duration of a language program, or if such motivation may impact students' writing skills, apart from counting the number of words in the students' entries (Fellner & Apple, 2006).
Instead there has been a tendency to take for granted that the young learners will be attracted to this new technology and thrilled to engage in this practice. Besides, many of the studies claiming high student motivation have been mostly conducted with small or medium-size groups of participants. For example, in Pinkman's (2005)  Our study intends to fill this gap using a triangulation approach with a dataset of 158. Pre-mid-and end of semester blogging surveys are the focus of interest and will be analysed in detail below.

Methodology
This study draws on the utilisation of weblogs (hereafter blogs), a digital medium of communication, to complement the face-to-face pedagogical learning methods used in classroom situations to teach intermediate second language learners of Spanish or French as it has been demonstrated that this level can benefit from this experience (Prichard, 2008).
Our experience, based on over 20 years of teaching, tells us that intermediate language learners need to carry out activities that encourage them to further improve their language proficiency in order to attain a higher level of the language. Many students at intermediate level, in our language courses, tend to use the same syntactical structures and employ a similar set of lexicon items learnt in previous years, without venturing into and exploring new forms of displaying their thoughts. In this manuscript we analyse part of a larger dataset focusing on students' motivation and attitude to blogging in a foreign language. Future analysis will be conducted across language groups.

Participants
The participants in this study are Spanish and French learners of the language with a language proficiency equivalent to B1 and B2 in the Common European Framework of Reference of Language (2001). The total number of students is 158; comprising 100 French students (89 females and 21 males) and 58 Spanish learners; consisting of 47 females and 11 males. Students are between 20-24 years old, with one student being in his 60s. The preblogging survey reveals that 84% of these students do not have a personal blog, although 99% of them are familiar with this way of communication.
The language instructors' cohort is formed by five females (three in Spanish and two in French) and one male (in French). The years of experience in language teaching at the tertiary level ranges from 2-10. The authors of this manuscript are the coordinators of the respective Spanish and French units. They maintained regular contact with language instructors but were not involved in the teaching of the units during the semester to prevent interference with the dataset.
As part of the assessment for the unit, Spanish and French learners were required to select a topic from a list of 25 items (or indicate an alternative one) and write between 8 (minimum) and 12 (maximum) individual blog entries (of 80 words minimum) during the 12 week program which constitutes a semester of study in the university this study was conducted. In addition, students were asked to write at least three comments on an assigned student's blog. A total of a 20% of the overall mark for the unit was allocated to the blog activity; the remaining 80% comprised other language and cultural activities strengthening oral and aural skills.
Previous studies have shown the importance of peer-feedback through the comments posted on people's blogs (Betts & Glogoff, 2004;Sun, 2009). Recognising the value of the interactive nature of posting comments and responding to them, we allocated a 5% of the total subject mark to it. Students were paired in relation to a common topic, in the case of Spanish or were allocated randomly, in the case of French.
The participation to the project was on a voluntary basis and consent was sought following the Ethics regulations of the university.

Instruments
The triangulation approach studies students' motivation to blogging in detail through i) pre-survey, ii), mid-survey and iii) end-survey. Data collection was undertaken from three questionnaires which were distributed to the students in hard copy. The participation was on an anonymous basis.
Pre-survey. The pre-survey is administered in anticipation of students posting the first blog entry and following an introduction session where Spanish and French students were asked to attend. The main purpose is to identify students' knowledge and experience to blogging; in addition to assessing students' initial motivation and identifying the potential difficulties that students may face.
Yes/no questions, free writing segments and a selection of items from a list are utilised for the collection of the dataset (see Appendix A).

Mid-survey.
The mid-survey includes some questions which are the same as the pre-survey, this allows for a comparison between times. However, a set of different questions is also included. Answers to the questions are evaluated on a Lickert scale (1 = strongly agree; 2 = agree; 3 = no opinion; 4 = disagree; 5 = strongly disagree). This survey was administered in week 5 of the project (see Appendix B).
End-survey. This survey was administered in weeks 11 and 12 of the project which represented the last two weeks of the 12 week program. We have kept the same questions on difficulties, and motivation. In addition, we introduced questions regarding the time spent on the activity, students' attitude towards blogging, and reflections about receiving comments. Students were also asked to select project descriptors among those given in the list (see Appendix C).

Research questions
Two main research questions will be addressed in this paper: 1. Have students' perceived motivation to blogging changed throughout the project? 2. What are the students' experiences about blogging?

Results
Data from the three surveys were processed qualitatively and quantitatively to address research questions. The number of respondents has been different throughout the process: 130 out of 158 students returned the pre-survey, 111 did the mid-survey, and 120 the endsurvey. To keep analysis consistency, and considering the fact that the number of answers also depends on the question type (open, semi-open, closed-end, multiple choice, etc.), it has been decided to use percentages to express the results and to illustrate some of the challenges that students experienced in blogging. Since this information is vital to the implementation of this activity into the language curriculum, students were asked in the pre-survey to identify by themselves three difficulties they could encounter when using this medium. As can be seen from Table 1, the difficulties mostly cited by students were "technical difficulties" followed by "language difficulties" and "time management". Some students also included additional explanations that we found relevant. Such explanations give a clearer idea of the kind of concerns students may have before the beginning of this project. Some of them express concerns about writing "in a way that engages the audience" and "developing meaningful dialogue on the issue" (Spanish Studies, student no. 107), other students comment on "interacting with unknown people" (French Studies, student no.55), "sharing ideas and work with other students" (French Studies, student no.60). Two of them seemed to be afraid that "people won't understand my bad grammar" (French Studies, student no. 34), and that "people are très [very] judgemental" (French Studies, student no.5). Once these potential obstacles were identified, we asked the students to rate the perceived level of difficulty for each category and we compared the results between mid-survey (S2, n = 111) and end-survey (S3, n = 120). Table 2 is an illustration of how the perceptions of students changed through the 12 week program. The mid-survey (S2) reveals that the majority of students rated technical issues (42%), language aspects (47%), commenting on another blog (41%), topic choice (47%), and motivation (39%) in the category of "easy" and "very easy". Time management is considered acceptable by 43% of students, whereas sources appear to be identified as a "very difficult" and "difficult" task by the same proportion of students (43%). The end-survey (S3) shows changes in students' perception of difficulties: only three categories are still recognised as very easy and easy: technical aspects (50%), topic choice (43%) and motivation (37%). Language aspects and comments at this stage are regarded as acceptable (54% and 45% of students respectively); sources are still described by 40% of them as a difficult and very difficult element.
In order to explore further the difficulties encountered, we asked students in the endsurvey to indicate the amount of time they spent in writing and researching. This information allowed us to carry out a correlation between specific categories of difficulties and the amount of time dedicated to writing and research Table 3 shows the results. A closer analysis of the student's evolving perception has been done by a systematic comparison between mid-and end-survey results for each category of identified type of difficulty. The grouping of results shows that technical aspects and sources are the two categories for which percentages in "easy" and "very easy" have significantly increased (respectively from 42 to 50%, and from 21 to 25%). On the other hand, "difficult" and "very difficult" percentages have become more important for language aspects (11 to 19%), motivation (23 to 31%) and time management (33% to 48%). The following quotes illustrate the students' perception on this specific aspect of blogging: "It was highly time consuming and was more of an obligation rather than something I would voluntarily engage in." (French Studies, student no. 6); "Time consuming for the amount of marks it's worth." (Spanish Studies, student no. 94).
To go further, we decided to establish correlations through data crossing. Each student's individual answers for the whole questionnaire were registered in a specific Excel file table for each survey, with filters in the columns corresponding to the different difficulties categories (technical aspects, language aspects, time management, comments, sources, topic choice, and motivation). Filters appear as a button with a little arrow on the top of each column. Clicking on this little arrow allows a display menu including different options to be selected (A = acceptable, E = easy, VE = very easy, D = difficult, and VD = very difficult). Selecting one of these options for each column gives a detailed list of the students who chose them together with the time allocated by them to writing an entry and researching on the topic.
This way of establishing correlation shows that among the 57 (47.5%) students who chose "very difficult" and "difficult" as a description of time management in blogging (see Appendix D), 77% of them claimed to spend a range of 30 minutes to more than an hour in writing, and 53% responded to use the same amount of time to carry out research (against 39% who indicated an average of 15-30 minutes). When motivation is analysed, only 37 (30.8%) students indicated that keeping motivation throughout the program was a "'very difficult"/ "difficult task" (see Appendix E), and 32% of them spent between 30 and 45 minutes in writing their blog entries (38% were over 45 minutes). In contrast, in Pinkman's research (2005), students reported being involved for 30 minutes a week in the activity of blogging.
The amount of time dedicated to reading and writing in our study does not appear to suggest that there is a lack of interest and motivation in the activity of blogging; otherwise the time spent may have shown a decline throughout the course of the project. In order to understand what "motivation" means for students we combined the results of the three surveys to obtain a more comprehensive understanding (see Table 4). In the pre-survey, 59% of students replied they were motivated with the project (against 28% who marked "no opinion" and 13% who marked "no"). In the mid-survey, 64% gave positive answers, 15% a negative one and 21% still had no opinion. Finally, at the end of semester, 44% recognized to be "more motivated" than at the beginning of the semester, 39% were "equally motivated". If we combine the latter two figures there are more than three-quarters who are motivated with the activity in contrast to 17% who are less motivated. To summarize, the percentage of students showing motivation increased during the 12 week program and the lack of motivation was low in the same period. If we take into account the 13% of students who answered negatively to motivation in the pre-survey and the 17% who lost the motivation at the end of the program, then we can conclude that the real "loss" was only 4%. It could be argued that the program failed to engage those who were unmotivated from the start; nevertheless this is not conclusive as there is a need to follow up each individual comment throughout the program to reach such conclusion. It would be interesting to see whether specific individuals who were unmotivated at the beginning continued to be unmotivated at the end or whether they were different individuals. Unfortunately, in our study, comments were completely anonymous and the varying number of respondents in the three surveys prevents us to try to identify those "lost" students.
However, when asked in the end-survey if they would intend to continue blogging after the end of the semester (S3, question no.11), 64% of the students replied "no" (against 9% of "yes" and 27% of no opinion). One way to approach this paradox is to take into account students' opinions regarding their positive and negative attitudes of the project (see Tables  5 and 6).
Information gathered in two open questions (S3, question no. 4: "What did you dislike?" and no. 5: "What did you enjoy?") reveals that the aspects about blogging that students look most favourably upon are clustered into five main categories: learning and researching on a specific topic (35%), the promotion of a creative and independent research (22%), the flexibility of topic and media choice (10%), language enhancement (9%) and the opportunity to interact in the language (6%). As adverse comments, students mainly mentioned that blogging is a time-consuming activity (25%), that they had difficulty varying style and content in each post (18%), and that the requirements were too vague (15%). It was also challenging for them to find different and relevant sources (6%), to comply with the restriction of word number (6%) and the limitation on commenting on other blogs (5%). In a smaller proportion, they mentioned to have lack of feedback (4%) and technical difficulties (4%).
Finally, the last open question of the end-survey was about suggestions to improve the project, and the students particularly outlined the need of encouraging better interactions with peers. It must be outlined that the interactive nature of blogging was only mentioned by 20% of students in the pre-survey in response to the question: "In your opinion, what is the difference between a blog and a personal web site?" In contrast, 56% considered blogging as "opinion-based" medium, 16% as "online journal" and 8% as "informative" activity. A total of 10% of students expressed that "to judge others and to be judged" could be a difficulty. In the mid-survey, we asked them to give their opinions about the usefulness of comments (S2, question no. 5 and no. 6): 48% declared that comments helped them to improve the quality of their blog and 53% found this kind of feedback positive in terms of improving their writing skills. Some of them made additional comments (unpolished

The impact of blogging in language learning
In this paper we wanted to contribute to the current discussion of the impact of blogging on language learning. It is generally assumed that individual blogs present multiple benefits in terms of students' language skills improvement, even if this activity is recognized as timeconsuming and difficult to manage with large groups. To overcome these well-accepted ideas, we focused our study on the relationship between the students' perceived difficulties concerning individual blogs as a part of their language curriculum, and the evolution of their motivation throughout the 12 week program. Our results show that students' views of their difficulties in blogging changed over the period. Technical issues were mentioned at the beginning of the program, and it was initially surprising to discover that a vast majority of our young students (84%), supposed to be familiar with Web 2.0, declared in the pre-survey that they were not used to blogging. As expected, most of the technical issues (especially in terms of posting/receiving comments) were rapidly solved and faded away by the end of the project.
However, time-management, sources, and keeping motivation appear to be more constant concerns: it seems that students have underestimated those difficulties at the beginning, which is predictable due to their lack of practice. As previously pointed out, time-management is clearly the most negative aspect of blogging for students and is closely linked to the question of keeping motivation. The results regarding sources are more paradoxical: identified in the pre-survey as a potential difficulty by 9% of the students, it remains a major concern in the mid-and end-survey (43 and 40% of them consider that finding relevant sources is a difficult and very difficult task). In the end-survey, it is interesting to notice that 6% of them still mention it as a disliked part of the project, whereas there is a clear tendency to report satisfaction in doing research on the selected topic. We interpret this result as a positive sign from students who begin to engage themselves in research: they seem to become aware that writing posts not only involves language development but also requires a relevant and accurate background. The average time spent on writing and on research is also evidence of the global engagement of students: more than one-third of them declared to allocate 30 to 45 minutes to write and 15 to 30 minutes to research.
In addressing the question of motivation, we have chosen to analyse it in terms of time spent in the activity in contrast with previous studies which have focused on the number of words in the text (Fellner & Apple, 2006). Motivation, measured through the time spent on the activity, increased throughout the program for more than three-quarters of the students. Nevertheless, some of them showed a negative attitude to this exercise indicating that it was a time consuming task. From a pedagogical perspective, we could argue that students' perception of the time dedicated to research and writing is a good result as it is precisely the exposure to and practice of the language that makes a good language learner.

Limitations of this study and suggested research
As a part of a current research project, this paper only explores a part of the dataset and some identified limitations to the study have to be mentioned. The first one is the discrepancy between the implementation of a digital medium in language teaching and learning, and the traditional way used to collect data on this project (paper version questionnaire). With no doubt, in the future, surveys should also be online to provide a full virtual learning environment. Moreover, to further explore language development aspects, comparisons should be carried out across Spanish and French to understand how students' opinion may differ between languages. Similarly, greater focus should be on analysing students' writing skills throughout the program to detect any writing skills enhancement. For this, it will be necessary to cross data collected not only from students but also from language instructors involved in this implementation.
Last but not least, our blog project -still in progress -gives us the opportunity to combine pedagogical approach and research. Since the beginning, the emphasis has been on the sustainability of this kind of practice in the language classroom, by evidencing not only benefits but also hurdles faced by students. At this stage, our main achievement is to provide a refined template of blogging activity which can be implemented across languages for students at intermediate and advanced level, and which can lead to further investigation.

acknowledgements
Our most sincere thanks go to all students and language instructors who were keen to be involved in the project. We also thank Cecilia Kokubu, our research assistant, for her promptness in collating the surveys, accurate approach to the data and useful feedback. 19% 16% no answer 3% 3%