Emotional well-being of students through blogging in learning English

Abstract

This paper proposes an approach to the emotional well-being of learners, analysing it as a construct that, along with others, contributes to enhancing the learning process in compulsory secondary education. In a more specific way, we aim to verify if educational technology and, to be more concrete, blogging as a learning tool can be relevant to improving the emotional well-being of learners while learning English as a foreign language. Moreover, we also pretend to refute whether well-being is positively determined while blogging to verify whether significant learning occurs. With this in mind, we analyse the use of blogs within the teaching and learning process of the English language in 4th-year compulsory secondary education. The learners who participated in this experiment had an A2 level of English according to the European Framework of Reference for Languages, having completed an initial test at the beginning of the year. Having identified low motivation by learners in secondary education, two research questions were established in order to verify whether both blogging and emotional well-being of learners were positively determined during the experiment and, therefore, if learners improved their EFL written production through blogging. From these two research questions, two starting hypotheses were set up. From these two research questions, two starting hypotheses were set up. We used the subjective well-being questionnaire, and so qualitative data were utilised.