Using blogs to improve writing fluency

Terry Fellner

Matthew Apple

Maggie Lieb

Saga University

10:30-10:50 AM

Looked a writing fluency. Established fluency = word count + lexical frequency + comprehensibility

Focused on increasing writing fluency.

• Enlarge active vocabulary (from passive to active)
• Increased exposure to vocabulary
• use of blogs
• concordances
• Movie trailers
• Grammar games
• Diamond ranking (Fellner, 2005)

Used daily topics, in a 7-day course,that were emailed to the students. They were restricted to 20 minutes for a blog posting. They then commented on classmates' blogs.

They wrote more (though that is a little fuzzy). They did control of typing speed (great idea). They tested on first and last day.