Post 162: The Use of Dialogue Journals to Promote Improved Writing skills in ELL and English Composition Students (NS)

Post 162: The use of Dialogue Journals to Promote Improved Writing Skills


Dialogue Journals have been extensively in bilingual, ESL, and grade-level classrooms to develop writing skills as well as to enhance personal communication and mutual understanding between teacher and student. Using this technique, each student keeps a notebook in which a private written conversation is carried on between teacher and student or between two peers in class. The writing style is informal, conversational language, and students are free to write what interests them. A teacher comments what the student writes in a warm fashion. (Ovando, 156)

This kind of journal writing can be used to teach the beginning student English where the student can write some in his L1 and some in his L2 as much as he can and then little by little the student switches over to the L2 like I did with Zhen Ni. I kept such a dialogue journal with Zhen Ni and she went from writing in Chinese to English more and more until her entire dialogue journal was in English.

For online teaching, dialogue journals can be incorporated into blog entries or into long forum discussions where students write about how what they study in the classroom impacts their lives. Teachers use questions of increasing difficulty (Bloom's Taxonomy) to promote student conversation. At first, the teacher may guide the conversation, but as the students learn the topic, then the teacher encourages the student to produce their own material until through role playing, debates, the students take over the discussions in the forums.

For grade-level  use, I taught 9th grade English and I had my 9th grade NS read The Wizard of Oz. Then, I had them write in their journal, their reaction to each chapter we read. They were allowed to draw pictures, write poetry, or even rewrite the chapter to include themselves in the story (similar to fanfiction writing where people inject themselves into TV shows) and then I would write comments about their posts. I remember grading into the night with stacks of journals on my desk. So it is somewhat time consuming reading through all the journals, but the students really improve their writing.

I read the book Freedom Writers and I watched the movie and loved it.In the movie, Freedom Writers,  Erin Gruell gave her students journals to write in. Students were allowed to write about anything they wanted. Many students wrote about their home lives or about their families. Erin Gruell read these journals and from these journals, came the Freedom Writer book and movie. Gruell used her students' journals to transform not only her life and her teaching, but the lives of her students. She taught the students that each person has a story and she taught them the power of the pen can work for you. For more information on The Freedom Writers go to this link.

You can also go to this link for more dialogue journal activities.

https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/images/uploads/Dialogue_Journals_for_High_School_.pdf