Travel Blog as an ESL Teaching Tool
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.31261/IJREL.2020.6.1.05Keywords:
travel blog, English language teaching, rich semantics, verbal creativity, cultural realityAbstract
Current stage of ICT development necessitates the improvement of teaching tools, skills, and learning outcomes. The article discusses bright educational prospects of travel blogging for students of English as a second language (ESL). The authors suggest a short theoretical overview of research into travel blogosphere’s educational opportunities, while discussing a classification of travel blogs according to the type of sender vs receiver communication. On a wide and modern textual material the article considers such prominent features of travel storytelling as polysemantic vocabulary, compact meaning representation, strategies to present cultural information and verbal creativity which can be of true interest for students of B2 level and above. The readers can also learn about a few forms of activity with travel stories which are individual special sampling with some specific focus (pun, irony, creative instances of word building), presentation of foreign culture by means of English, project work for a small group of enthusiasts, sampling stories by country, by area or by activity, and presenting one concise story to the classroom, as their own post or a paper brochure.
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