Developing writing skills through the use of blogs

Abstract

This paper aims at describing an empirical research carried out in a private school in Fortaleza, Brazil, in which the production of a blog was used as an opportunity to teach writing skills in Portuguese, based on the curricular parameters for Brazilian basic education, which postulate that the teaching of Portuguese has to be based on texts. The theoretical background for this study was extracted from Schneuwly and Dolz (2004), who developed the idea of the teaching dimensions of genres. In order to accomplish our research purposes, a group of teachers from a private school in Fortaleza was invited to take part in a set of activities focused on the use of blogs as teaching tools. The present study seeks to provide a view on the potential of digital writing as a pedagogical tool for the development of discursive skills, contributing to linguistic analysis practices in the classroom.