Blogging might help the Mauritian “collez*” students improve their writing skills.
I was looking for a chronicle topic to post on but couldn’t really find an interesting one. Then came the thought that my chronicle topics gravitate around storytelling. The logical follow up was to find a story to tell. But then the idea shifted to when I really started writing stories. Well, we should even start at when I started telling stories: I must have been a real good liar when I was a kiddy. People would nowadays put that under the “creative” or “imaginative” tag.
Storytelling in the Mauritian education.
Those of us having tried the “Alliance Française” lectures in Standard 6 onwards are those who have first encountered the storytelling approach of the canvas we had to write. It was the never-ending “A day at the seaside”, “A day at school”, “A rainy day”… and so on topics. You had this and had to write a 1 to 2 page narrative on the subject. This would then become the standard of writing when we got into “collez”. So all of us have to write interesting up to date narratives in English and French throughout our poor student lives. But here crops the different problems. I’ve often heard that Mauritian kids had problems in writing English or French through the lack of training.
Blogs as crutches.
Training and practice is the big problem in this equation. Blogs are now more popular among teens, young adults and adults. Setting aside the fact that writing on a blog is more or less informal, these can act like real crutches to the “collez” students in need of practice. Even if the tone is informal, encouraging teens to open blogs and to write would, in my humble opinion, improve their abilities to write and think out of the box as they will be writing and talking about things that bear particular interest for them: themselves!
Maintaining a blog would break the boredom of writing on uninteresting topics, would incite them to use a more elaborate vocabulary (to get away from boredom also) and give them the incentive of plainly writing. To get visitor attention, most of them would not indulge into plagiarism and the only perspective of losing comments would drive them crazy. Finally, this would be a side activity that would help these young persons make use of the time they spend on the Internet as well as their brains.
Finally, the Mauritian General Paper exams in English at the end of the HSC are mainly oriented towards general knowledge, culture and the scrutinising of up to date information and news. Maintaining a blog might drive the students to remain up to date with the latest information available to be able to blog on the hot topics. This would therefore be a real help to them at this level in the education system.
Let’s talk about this…
Do you think that encouraging blogging would really help improve this side of our education system? Has blogging helped you in the way you write or the style you use? Do you think that the Mauritian “colleziens” are ready for such an activity (comparing local teen blogging community to actual bloggers)? What would be the pros and cons of such an incentive?
*”collez” in Mauritius is the Creole world for college, differing from the American description of college. College in Mauritius is junior high and high school all mixed in one.

