Abstract

Taking a corpus approach, this study analyzed writing samples collected from student bloggers and non-blogging students. The aim was to determine whether the two groups of students wrote with different linguistic features (tokens, types, token-type ratio, parts of speech, and lexical features). Any similarities and differences found in the comparison between the writing samples would have implications for the effects of the blogging approach on student writers. The results show that the non-blogging student writers wrote more (tokens, types) than the student bloggers did; there were also differences between the two groups of students writing in terms of POS tags in their writing and the results of keyword analysis. However, a closer look at the differences found here suggests no particularly significant variations between the textual information created by the two groups of students. Nevertheless, taken together, the results tend to suggest that classroom blogging had a relatively weaker effect than the conventional teaching approach on Taiwanese EFL student writers.

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