Blogs for specific purposes: Expressivist or socio-cognitivist approach?

Abstract This paper represents an earnest attempt to identify specific pedagogical roles for blogs in language learning. After briefly describing various types of blogs and defining their purposes (Herring et al. , 2005) we attempt to accommodate their position and application within language teaching (Thorne Ferris Thorne, 2003) wherein language students at a Third Level Institution were set a blog writing task initially over a complete semester (12 weeks). The blog exercise employed both an early expressivist approach and later a (socio-) cognitivist one. Our findings, with examples from students' blogs (and also from students who continued their blogs over a 6 month period), will be presented as well as our recommendations for the integration of blogs into L2 virtual writing environments.