O n f e r e n c e

participants in classrooms.
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Excellent opportunities for students to read and write.
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Effective forums for collaboration and discussion.
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Powerful tools to enable mentoring to occur. 
Blogs provide a space where teachers and students can work to further improve writing 
or other skills with the benefit of an instant audience. Teachers can provide instructional 
guidelines, and students can perform and benefit from peer review. Participants can also 
construct online mentoring through the blog. For example, a class of some students can 
help their peers develop more confidence in their writing skills when such participants 
post good and encouraging comments on the posted writings of their peers. Students can 
also participate in cooperative learning activities that demand them to communicate 
research findings, ideas, or suggestion. 
A legal English class blog paves the way for students to discuss topics outside of the 
classroom. It opens the opportunity to the participants to share experiences pertaining to 
the legal profession .With the legal blog, every person including the instructor has an 
equal opportunity to share their thoughts and opinions. Students have the time to be 
responsive and reflective. Teachers can also raise debatable issues for the group of 
knowledgeable participants to discuss on a blog. 
The Methodological Problems and Challenges Encountered When Designing, 
Conducting and Reporting Research
The compilation of the program materials and activities has been a fundamental 
challenge. The English for lawyers program, designed by one of the researchers, has 
demanded 3 years of painstaking and meticulous work due to the nature of the legal 
texts and the activities of the program .Another hindrance has been the low enrollment 
due to writing apprehension and the lack of marketing tools; as such, the results might 
vary in case the number of participants increases. More importantly, the required 
qualifications of the instructor who can teach any of the levels of the program are not 
common in Lebanon because such professional should hold a degree in English and 
another in law so that he/she can be capable to give the legal English instruction. A 
fourth problem has been the lack of resources since the participants intend to learn the 
legal English terms and expressions and their equivalents in Arabic.
The researchers' findings also add to the challenges, and they assert that future research 
include studies to reveal language acquisition or learning comprehension and retention 
when using weblogs. Likewise, understanding similarities and differences among gender, 
ethnicity and age groups would help develop more personalized approaches to classroom 
implementation and enhance the applicability of weblogs in educational settings.