Exploring communicative practices in the blogging of female EFL university students

National Central University, Taiwan mliang@cc.ncu.edu.tw Blogs and other Web 2.0 technologies have offered the possibility of interactive communication to students who use English as a foreign language (EFL). The author proposes that we should explore how university students coconstruct a multitude of interactions within and around EFL blogging. Drawing on two interconnected methodologies – sociocultural theory and sociolinguistic studies – this paper analyzes online interactive discourse among small groups of female EFL students in an undergraduate “Online English Learning” course. The analysis suggests that the integration of these interactive, community-based approaches to EFL blogging opens up rich and complex communicative practices in which participants can share second language (L2) knowledge, support each other, and present their virtual selves through creative text construction and semiotic language use. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications for L2 learning and future research.