Investigating brazilian public sector EFL reading strategies for the blog genre

Abstract

The present research aims at investigating both the degree to which blogs are characterized as a socially recognized genre and the reading behaviour of a group of public school EFL learners when faced with those blogs. The corpus consists of twenty selected blogs and data collected from the application of a questionnaire, group interview and think-aloud protocols performed by the target group of learners. In order to verify the genre status of the blogs, this study has drawn on Swales (1990) theory of genre analysis and utilized his criteria for identifying the discourse community involved with the blogs. The analyses carried out in this investigation have confirmed the hypotheses that blogs do represent a webgenre and that these learners reading processes are based on the use of bottom-up reading strategies,. These results revealed the need to reflect upon the way within which blogs may be applied to the EFL reading class, since they constitute a hybrid genre. The work concludes by suggesting further research, including contrastive studies regarding other web-genres and their pedagogical implications, in terms of English language teaching and learning.