Pedagogical science
Modern teaching methods
Kozachenko I. V.
SHHE”Pereyaslav State Pedagogical University”
Postgraduate student department of education, Ukraine
Dialogue journals in English
Dialogue journaling is certainly not a new idea. The
actual name “dialogue journal”
was created in 1979 by Jana Staton, an educational psychologist and Leslee Reed, a sixth-grade teacher, to describe their practice
of daily writing back and forth with their
students. These were native English speaking students, and they were children. The population in the present study is
adults that are English language learners,
some of whom are non-formally educated and some of whom are at a low literacy level. However, despite these significant
differences, it seems feasible that dialogue
journaling can be a beneficial activity for any student and can positively
affect the students’ writing
accuracy of specific, targeted morphemes. That being looked at, it also stands to reason that the method of response to the
journaling could affect the outcomes
as well.
Dialogue journals
can be thought of as conversations between two or more
individuals that are written in nature and kept in a
notebook or on a computer. Both
partners write to each other, back and forth, over a
period of time [1]. Many
times these exchanges are between teacher and student, but
are certainly not limited to those individuals. A tutor
or a peer may also use this sort of interaction.
This communication is used to exchange ideas, thoughts, questions, concerns or really any
information that creates interest between the two parties.
As dialogue
journals are used in more and more classrooms, educators and linguists have
recognized some essential characteristics that specifically identify dialogue journal writing as compared to other kinds of written
communications states that first of all, dialogue journals are
interactive [3,p. 45].
Both the teacher
and the students (or whomever the parties involved may be) take equal turns
writing and responding. Both
of the participants would write regularly - for adult students, this could be
up to one to three times per week.
And, the correspondence will take place throughout the duration of the course. Additionally, Jones notes that topics are
usually not assigned – leaving
the writers to feel free to discuss whatever they choose [4]. However,
sometimes there could be a broad
suggested topic or topics, which the participants have room to personalize to fit their individual interests.
Another
characteristic of dialogue journals is that they are generally not corrected or graded. Because the writing is not corrected, it leads
to more genuine dialogue and assists
the students in feeling more free and unthreatened with their writing.
However, many
students prefer to have everything
they do corrected – this conflict
will be addressed later in this chapter. It is important to actually physically keep the journal in something, like
a notebook or saved e-mails,
that can be referred back to. This is key because unlike oral conversations, this is more of a learning tool that gives
the participants something to look back
on and review. There are six qualities that really set this writing apart from other types of academic
writing.
·
the writing needs to focus on communication, underneath spelling errors,
punctuation mistakes and other surface issues, the
important matter is what is being communicated;
·
the exchanges need to be non-threatening. While some students may feel intimidated speaking out in class, the journal should be a safe
place for them to communicate without fear of
embarrassment or self-consciousness;
·
the topics should be of great interest
– many times this could be things that a participant might not feel comfortable sharing in front of an entire class;
·
it is very
important to have equality in the
interaction. Whereas in the classroom the teacher is the authority figure, in the journal, both parties are equals merely conversing
about various topics;
·
the journals should be functional – that is “demonstrating a
variety of communicative purposes”.
Things like, responding to questions, requesting information, complaining, evaluating, etc. many times are all included
within the various entries over time.
Dialogue journals
help in building community within classrooms
and it should have used them in traditional English classroom with native speaking high school students. But, could a dialogue journal improve a
student’s writing? Certainly on the
surface it incorporated many cognitive learning strategies into an ongoing
activity: repeating (perhaps
beginning and ending entries the same way), formally practicing the writing system, recognizing and using formulas and
patterns (this could bring much more awareness
of routine phrases), recombining (definitely a non-threatening outlet for experimenting with longer phrases) and practicing
naturalistically (a conversation in written
form). Using print to understand incoming or produce outgoing messages, analyzing expressions, translating, transferring,
summarizing and highlighting could also all be applied.
Additionally, other research with dialogue journaling was
done on very young ESL leaners.
Literature
1.
Kreeft J. Dialogue writing: Bridge from talk to essay
writing. Language Arts. – 2001. P. 141-150.
2.
Laufer B. Comparing focus on form and focus on forms
in secondlanguage vocabulary learning [Electronic version]. The Canadian Modern
Language Review, P. 149-166.
3.
Lightbown P, Spada, N. How Languages are Learned. Oxford:
Oxford University Press. – 2000.
4.
Kim J. A community within the classroom: Dialogue
journal writing of adult ESL learners. Adult Basic Educatio. – 2005. p. 21-32.