Blog as a Tool of Fostering Digital Literacy and Communicative Skills of Secondary School Efl Learners

The paper addresses the issue of linguistic and didactic peculiarities of English blogs as a tool of forming EFL secondary school learners’ digital literacy and communicative competence. The acuteness of this research is determined by the necessity to make further exploration of the role of blog-technologies in enhancing students’ digital habits and fostering online interactive skills. The objective of the paper is to define language features of English blogs and to outline the ways blogs can be used in EFL teaching. Ukrainian national secondary school curricula indicate that a foreign language speech competence is achieved through acquisition of a number of skills, including the ones that are gained within informational and digital sphere that include the ability to learn a foreign language with the help of computer programs and social networks, to interact via informational-communicative technologies, to design foreign language digital products, to conduct a goal-oriented online communication etc. The above mentioned program requirements give reasons to state that an English blog can be viewed as a tool of fostering an overall foreign language speech competence including the skills of an online interaction. Incorporating blogs in the instructional service aims at managing and administering the educational process, improving EFL learners’ digital literacy, developing lexical and grammatical knowledge and habits, enhancing communicative skills of online blogging interaction and increasing motivation in a foreign language acquisition. In order to provide a systemic and successive teaching online interaction to secondary school students it is reasonable to stick to the following sequence of blog activities: teaching netiquette and enlarging the set of digital skills; teaching communicative strategies in commenting blog posts and linguistic framing of commentaries per se; teaching designing individual and group blog posts as coherent and cohesive texts that appeal to the reading audience and include audio-visual content and hyperlinks.