Daniel Pascual And Pilar Mur Dueñas give a session on digital texts in the EFL class as part of our Linguistic Corner activities

14th February 2019.

In this session, we invited students to deal with the characteristics of digital genres that are commonly employed nowadays, and should be introduced in the language classroom, such as blogs. After discussing their communicative purposes and their similar and different affordances with other digital genres, we focused on some pedagogical and methodological tenets, specifically, Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) and Task-Based Learning (TBL) to exploit travel blogs for the learning of English as a Foreign Language (EFL).

Through a number of different hands-on tasks, students could experience, and simultaneously reflect on, the potential benefits of working with digital texts to improve students’ communicative competence in English, as well as other competences such as the digital or the intercultural one. The emphasis was placed on the relevance of the process for EFL students to produce a text, rather than just on the product. The different tasks provided us with input to enhance a process-writing approach, as well as to know more about the rhetorical structure of the digital genre, the expectations of the potential audience as for the register or the content, and the lexico-grammatical characteristics that are characteristic of specific genres in the blogosphere.