Learning communicative competences through celebrity gossip blogs

Celebrity gossip blogs have become a stimulating discourse practice that mainly offers the latest news about celebs. Due to the great variety of gossip blogs that exist nowadays, bloggers try to attract readers with a continuous update of the news presented and, on many occasions, they employ doubtful sources to provide the freshest piece of information. As a result, these writers may attribute their words to these sources if the gossip is not truthful. Being a lively instance of language, the blogging exercise offers different opportunities to study the English language. The objectives of this study seek to improve the communicative competence in English of Baccalaureate Spanish students who have examined this discourse, following the Common European Framework of References for Languages. A qualitative methodology has been followed, based on a selection of blog entries chosen randomly. The conclusions show that students have developed their linguistic competence by considering some forms of speech presentation. They have also deepened their knowledge of the sociolinguistic competence by getting familiar with acronyms and the enallage of person that remind us of the spoken language. Finally, they have learned about the pragmatic competence by analysing illocutionary acts that are related to the occurrences of speech presentation.