The Development of Thai Students’ Ethos on Blogs in English as a Foreign Language Writing Classrooms

The present study aimed at studying the effects of blogs on ethos development. The participants were 14 grade 12 Thai students, selected via a purposive sampling method, in the first semester of 2014. The instruments included 1) a pre- and post-test, which was a writing assignment, 2) five lessons, 3) three assignments on three blogs, 4) a rubric for evaluating persuasive writing, 5) a rubric for evaluating ethos, and 6) an interview form. The data were analyzed using mean, S.D. and t-test scores. In addition, the participants’ answers were coded and analyzed qualitatively. The findings showed that the level of ethos perception in the participants’ writing increased significantly from the pretest to the posttest at the level of .05. It was found, in addition, that the participants used three major strategies to build up their ethos: appearance strategies, linguistic strategies, and proofreading strategies, all of which could strengthen the trustworthiness, reliability, and credibility of the writing.