This paper represents an earnest attempt to identify specific pedagogical rolesfor blogs in language learning. After briefly describing various types of blogsand defining their purposes (Herring et al.,2005) we attempt to accommodate their position and application within languageteaching (Thorne & Scott Payne, 2005), relating evidence fromteachers' blogs (Edublog.org) and also within Second Language Acquisition (SLA) theories.In particular, we shall be concentrating on the process and post-process writingapproaches (Matsuda, 2003), with particular emphasis on current cognitivist(Atkinson, 2003; Ferris & Hodgcock, 1998) and expressivist (Berlin,1988) theories. These approaches will be discussed in terms of theireffectiveness when establishing specific blog writing tasks. Whilst someresearchers have advocated for a ‘lead blog’ or templatefor other students to follow (Stone, 2004), we have been seeking an eclecticapproach based on the three approaches mentioned above. We shall describe ourown blended task methodology (Abermann, 2004; Thorne, 2003) wherein languagestudents at a Third Level Institution were set a blog writing task initiallyover a complete semester (12 weeks). The blog exercise employed both an earlyexpressivist approach and later a (socio-) cognitivist one. Our findings, withexamples from students' blogs (and also from students who continuedtheir blogs over a 6 month period), will be presented as well as ourrecommendations for the integration of blogs into L2 virtual writingenvironments.