Developing Writing Fluency and Lexical Complexity with Blogs.

Nowadays blogging is becoming a very essential tool for alternative assessment and for diary writing. In my previous posts I have mentioned some of the main skills that blogs can develop, like critical reading and thinking, sense of ownership, computer skills, etc. Now I want to add two other important skills which blogs can develop: the writing fluency and lexical complexity.
There has been conducted research in a university in Japan. The researchers integrated the university language learners into a seven-day intensive English course. The students' language proficiency level was low and the aim of the researchers was to find out their achievement in writing blog entries in terms of writing fluency and lexical complexity. So, the researchers describe the writing fluency by comparing the number of words and word frequency levels. While the lexical complexity is described by the difficulty level of words based on the frequency with which they normally occur in written English. During the research the students increased their critical reading skills dramatically, as they were not only writing their own blogs, but also they were reading the other students' blogs. After synthesizing and analyzing the blog entries of their classmates,they were actively commenting on each other;s blogs, thus making the process become more authentic.
Finally, the students' blog entries showed an overall increase both in their writing fluency and lexical complexity skills. According to the research results, the average word count for student email postings to the class blog showed an increase of nearly 350% (on the first day 31.5 words, and by the end of the program 121.9 words.). The lexical complexity level of the blog entries also increased. The words that were considered to be difficult for the students started to occur more frequently in the texts.
We can conclude that the blogs work very effectively in the language teaching and learning process. It is evident from both the researches done, and from our own experience of working with blogs as MA TEFL students. Now I'm thinking of some strategies which will help me to use blogs for language teaching and learning purposes.