Rationale for this site

Rationale for this site:  To create an open space for language teachers to connect with each other for the purpose of establishing blog peer partnerships for their students. 
The blog peer model is based on a successful project between two language learning classes at the University of Yamanashi (UY) in Japan, and the University of New Hampshire (UNH) in the Fall of 2007.  In this project, the students at UNH were native English speakers studying Japanese, while the students of UY were native Japanese speakers learning English.  Group blogs were established in Blogger for each group, and the students all wrote blog posts in L2.  In turn, they read each others blog posts, as native speakers, and added comments and feedback.  In this way, the students experienced authentic communication in both languages while also acting as "peer language coaches" for the students from the other school.

The project was quite successful, and many of the students moved on to continue blogging on thier own in L2 after the end of the course.