ࡻᄬିጯ English Teaching & Learning 30. 4 (April 2006): 69-85
Journal Exchange in a College Composition Classroom
1Chun-Chun Yeh
National Chung Cheng Universityfolccy@ccu.edu.tw
Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to explore the implementation of a journal exchange project and students’ views on this practice. Twenty-eight college students from an intact English composition class were assigned to small groups of four. They were encouraged to read and respond to their group mates’ journals. Student journals were collected for analysis. The patterns emerging from the analysis include development of audience awareness, establishment of group rapport, and misunderstanding arising from interactions. A questionnaire was administered to elicit the students’ views on the journal exchange project. The results indicate that students recognized the advantages of reading and responding to their classmates’ journals. It is also revealed that while some students appreciated teacher or peer feedback for various reasons, most of them enjoyed the stimulation of feedback from both sides. Points of reflection generated in the process of the project implementation and evaluation are also offered.
Key Words: journal exchange, writing instruction, peer feedback
INTRODUCTION
Journal writing in the language classroom has long been recognized as an efficient way to facilitate writing development and to enhance student-teacher communication (Holmes & Moulton, 1997; Peyton & Reed, 1990). Furthermore, its application in various contexts with different levels of students has been well documented. With very young ESL students, journal writing is usually used to introduce learners to the written language. Peyton and Reed (1990), for example, demonstrated in their book the flexibility of dialogue journals in different contexts. With beginning writers, who were only capable of drawing pictures and writing single words in their journal entries, the teacher responded to the learners’ “picture journals” with simple questions to engage learners in conversations.
The emphasis of journal writing with intermediate-level ESL students is often to promote writing fluency and to reduce writing apprehension. In a case study of an American university language program (Holmes & Moulton, 1997), students were
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reported to view journal writing as a learning strategy to increase their motivation to write and to promote fluency in writing. More specifically, they became more at ease with choosing topics and using the target language in the on-going journaling project. Their fears of writing were reduced and knowing that their journals would not be corrected helped them to express their feelings without too much apprehension.
With advanced ESL students and native-speaking students, journal writing is widely adopted in subject courses to promote learning and self-reflection. For instance, in several teacher education courses (Bailey, 1990; Daloglu, 2000), diaries were used throughout the courses to promote self-observation of student teachers’ teaching and their own learning in teaching. Besides teacher education programs, various subject fields, such as linguistics, nursing education and engineering, have also discovered the use of journal keeping for similar purposes (Allison, 1998; Callister, 1993; Neff, Beyerlein, Apple, & Krumsieg, 1995).
The studies mentioned above either focus on reflection journals, which students submit to teachers to show their learning or thinking processes, or on dialogue journals, where the teacher tries to establish a channel of communication with learners. Although many learners have been reported to benefit from these different forms of journal writing, one variation of diary2 keeping, “journal exchange,” has received relatively little notice.
“Journal exchange” can be realized in many ways. For example, journals can be exchanged between two learners, who respond to each other in a dialogic form. They can also be shared in a group, where one of the learners initiates a topic in anticipation of peer response. What distinguishes journal exchange from the more widely adopted teacher-student dialogue journal is the fact that, in the former, learners are writing for their peers (though still with the teacher’s monitoring), rather than writing for the teacher, as in other class assignments. In other words, peer feedback, together with its accompanying benefits, is more emphasized in a journal exchange project.
One study shows that journal exchange can be successfully employed in an upper level technical writing course (Pagnucci, 1998). In this study, Pagnucci argues that journals are a place for “developing a writer’s sense of audience” and “helping make writing seem less intimidating.” In the “practical, collaborative, friendly, and work-oriented” journals, the technical writing students documented and shared progress of their project work with two of their classmates. Through this sharing, students learned to offer constructive feedback as well as to use suggestions from a real audience to decide on their next actions. This awareness of the audience, Pagnucci claims, could benefit students when they approach and deal with future writing tasks.
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In this paper, the two terms, “diary” and “journal,” are used interchangeably, following Bailey (1990) and Allison (1998).
Yeh: Journal Exchange in a Composition Classroom In Goettsch’s (2001) study, the scope of journal exchange was bigger than in Pagnucci’s (1998). Two groups of advanced ESL students, taking a university-level writing and critical reading course, were required to subscribe to class e-mail lists. Each student was responsible for initiating a topic as well as for posting responses to existing topics. Learners reported that they appreciated “seeing how others think,” as well as “being listened to.” They also seemed to enjoy a sense of community both inside and outside the classroom. Besides this sense of “belonging,” students also felt that the on-line journal assisted them in developing writing and other important academic skills. These included summarizing and analyzing others’ remarks, arguing critically, and expressing agreement and disagreement effectively (Goettsch, 2001). Therefore, the on-line journal, Goettsch (2001) argues, helped to “create a community that would help students develop their competence in academic writing” (p. 83).
The above review shows that the element of peer response in journal exchange has the potential to instill a sense of audience into learners’ writing. In addition, the sense of “belonging,” created by the peer response, seems to be able to motivate students to write more. In the current study, the possibility of journal exchange in the Taiwanese context will be explored.
BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY
In a previous study on teacher-student dialogue journal writing (Yeh, 2004b), it was found that teacher feedback was well received by students and perceived to be beneficial to students’ writing development and personal growth. Nevertheless, the study also showed that response from the students was rather infrequent. One of the explanations advanced was that students might feel uncomfortable holding written communication with the teacher, who was perceived as an authority figure. Therefore, it was suggested that journal exchange among students be considered as an alternative.
The reasons to introduce peer feedback into journaling are manifold. First, students may feel more comfortable sharing opinions with their classmates, who they perceive to be of equal status. Second, students may perceive communication with their peers to be more meaningful, and advice or suggestions from peers more relevant, due to the fact that they have similar life experiences and views, and can be said to be “in the same boat.” Third, journal exchange provides an opportunity for students to read more and to benefit from their peers, both in terms of writing development and life experience in general. The current study is, therefore, a follow-up study with an aim to investigate peer interaction in a journal exchange project as well as to assess how students perceive peer feedback, as contrasted with teacher feedback.
METHOD
ParticipantsTwenty-eight sophomore English majors, who were taking a one-year composition course at a private technological university in southern Taiwan, participated in the study. The students had had seven years of English instruction, and their English writing level was estimated by the instructor and researcher to be high-beginner or low-intermediate. They had been required to study a year of grammar before taking the composition course, in which the current journal exchange project was introduced. Among the participants, 25 students had participated in an earlier study on dialogue journal writing (Yeh, 2004b), which was conducted during the first semester of that academic year. As journal writing was an on-going activity in the composition class, the other three students were also required to keep journals after they joined in the second semester. In other words, at the beginning of the current journal exchange project, which took place in the latter half of the second semester, the students had kept English journals for several months, and were assumed to be familiar with the genre of the personal journal.
The Journal Exchange Project
The main purpose of the journal exchange project was to reduce beginning writers’ anxiety, to increase writing practice, to enhance fluency, and to boost confidence in their writing abilities. Therefore, the project did not seek tight integration with the composition course. Rather, it was established as an independent writing task, where the students were free to explore topics of their own selection, to experiment with ideas, and to learn to express feelings and thoughts through writing.
The journal exchange project was announced as a slight modification to the existing practice of teacher-student dialogue journaling. It was explained to the students that through journal exchange they would not only be expanding the readership of their diaries, but also obtaining feedback from a different perspective other than their teacher’s, i.e., peer feedback. The class was divided into seven groups, each consisting of four students. The design was based on assumptions that it would be easier for students to establish and maintain relationships in small writing circles and that students would not be overwhelmed by too much reading.
The journal exchange project adopted a teacher-assigned grouping design model. While self-selection grouping allows students to find partners whom they are already familiar with and whom they feel comfortable sharing intimate thoughts with, students in a teacher-assigned grouping design can enjoy the opportunity to acquaint themselves with classmates whom they may not have known well. They can, thus,
Yeh: Journal Exchange in a Composition Classroom learn to establish a relationship by exchanging and sharing their writing within small groups. Besides, using the first semester’s journal writing record as a guide, I matched students who wrote more frequently with students who wrote less frequently, in the hope that the latter students might be motivated by observing their classmates engaged in the writing activity.
The procedures of the journal exchange were as follows: 1. Students wrote two journal entries each week.
2. Immediately after they finished one entry, they sent their journals, through e-mail, to their three group mates, as well as to their teacher.
3. Students read the journals sent by their group mates and provided feedback.
Learning to Provide Peer Feedback in Journals
Students need to be trained to perform a task, such as journal feedback, successfully. In this study, the students were trained to provide feedback in journals in two ways. First, as reported in the Participants section above, the students had kept journals for a period of time, during which they received feedback from the teacher regularly3. Teacher feedback included non-corrective feedback, such as providing advice, asking and answering questions, and giving encouragement, as well as corrective feedback, such as implicit language modeling (Peyton & Reed, 1990) and, occasionally, explicit error correction. These teacher responses were supposed to have made the students familiar with the variety of the forms that feedback on writing could take.
Second, the students were given two mini-lessons, each lasting twenty minutes, where explicit instruction on giving feedback was provided. Students were asked to write a short paragraph on a given topic. They exchanged papers with a partner and wrote their feedback on their classmates’ composition. They were instructed to indicate their agreement or disagreement of the views expressed to show their appreciation of the writing, and to ask questions for more information or clarification. Several student comments were read aloud and discussed to build confidence in the students and to model specific ways of providing feedback on peer writing. After the in-class writing practice, the students were encouraged to provide feedback on their classmates’ journals through e-mail. A sample journal entry, together with the exchanges that it initiated, is provided in Appendix A.
It should be noted that the students were not instructed to correct their peers’ writing, primarily because the researcher did not want them to feel resistant to the feedback task, as documented in Carson and Nelson’s (1996) study, where the
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To be specific, prior to the beginning of the current project, 25 students had kept journals for six months, while the remaining three participants had had a two-month experience of diary keeping.
Chinese students were shown to be reluctant to criticize their peers’ drafts.
Data Collection and Analysis
At the end of the two-month project, the students had produced a total of 497 journal entries, 198 of which were responses to their classmates’ journals. These entries were carefully read and compared to find patterns. Special features were noted to account for the multifaceted nature of student journal writing. In addition, a post-project questionnaire (Appendix B) was administered to gauge the students’ views on journal exchange.
RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
Features of Peer FeedbackThree features regarding peer feedback emerged: the development of a stronger sense of audience, the establishment of group rapport, and misunderstandings arising from interactions.
Development of a stronger sense of audience. First, a stronger awareness of
audience was observed to develop gradually as a result of journal exchange. This awareness was displayed most noticeably in the students’ requests for and willingness to give advice. One of the students, for example, openly solicited responses in his journal4, “I hope that I can get some response from anyone of you” (May 25, Peter). Cindy, one of his group members, immediately responded. She teased him before offering her suggestions to his request, “As you say, I response to you. Obviously, in this group of members seems not to response often. Is this a kind of opening subject to encourage us to response more? ” (May 25, Cindy).
Another instance is from Amy’s group. Amy wrote about a trip she had taken, which interested one of her group mates, Marilyn. Marilyn wanted to know more details about the trip, “It sounds a good experience. Can you tell it more detail?” (May 30, Marilyn). Amy quickly responded with detailed information, “[I]t was really a very good experience for me. The local residents are very kind. If you planning to visit there this summer vacation, I can give you the TEL about the hotel. . .” (May 31, Amy). Amy continued by supplying practical information, such as where to stay, what to bring, and what to do once there. This particular entry is packed with useful travel information because the writer was aware of the audience and used her knowledge and experience to share with her classmate.
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All the excerpts from student journals remain unedited. Pseudonyms are used throughout to protect the students’ identities.
Yeh: Journal Exchange in a Composition Classroom These instances of exchange suggest that students in this journal exchange project learned to write with an audience, their peers, in mind. When writing for a teacher (which is usually the case with writing assignments), novice writers might have difficulty deciding how much common ground they share with “the audience.” However, when writing for a known audience, their peers in particular, they will intuitively know what is expected of their writing. It becomes easier for them to make assumptions about the reader’s background knowledge and life experience, as well as to decide on the roles that they might play, and on the amount of information that they should provide in order to meet the audience expectations.
The audience awareness of these novice writers can be further observed in a student’s statement made in the post-project questionnaire. In this instance, students were asked to compare their journal writing attitudes before and after the journal exchange project. A student wrote, “I took [journal keeping] more seriously [after journal exchange started]. I didn’t want to be ridiculed because of bad writing” (S15).
It can be argued that with the exchange of diaries, journal writing became an authentic writing task, instead of a mere assignment written for a teacher. When writing for a teacher, students might consider journals as another pedagogical genre or, in an EFL context, an advanced grammar exercise. With a pedagogical genre or a grammar exercise, students are not likely to feel that they are writing for a real audience. Besides error correction or other forms of teacher feedback, students rarely have a chance to learn to evaluate their own writing from the reader’s perspective. Although the above remark shows, first and foremost, the student’s wish to protect her self-image, we may predict that this desire to protect self-image will prompt her to take the reader’s potential reactions into consideration when writing, and to eventually develop a stronger awareness of audience.
Establishment of group rapport. Offering encouragement, showing sympathy,
and sharing experience and exchanging opinions, were three devices observed to be used by the students to establish group rapport. For example, after Cindy expressed her growing interest in diary keeping, Peter responded by encouraging her to keep writing and promised to be her loyal reader, “Keep a diary is your interesting or a rule that you have to do it. If it is your interesting, you can keep a diary during the summer vacation as well, I hope to see it” (June 1, Peter).
The students also sought to develop group rapport by showing sympathy and support for each other. One example is from a group composed of four female students. After one of them revealed her depression in a journal entry, the other three students in the group sent messages immediately to express their sympathy and concerns. In another group, Sarah, having been injured in a motorbike accident, expressed gratitude in her journal towards those who had taken care of her during her
recovery from her injuries. Kathy, one of Sarah’s group mates, responded with a message to praise Sarah for her perseverance and to give her best wishes:
I was surprised that you got a terrible accident, but at the same, I also appreciated your strong attitude to face everything. For example, you also use your sweet smile to talk with us and you also use your steady attitude to describe the terrible accident to us. I admired your brave. I hope that everything will be better to you. (May 20, Kathy)
In addition, the students were observed to respond to their classmates’ writing by sharing experiences and exchanging opinions. For example, Ellen wrote about her excitement after she received a letter from an old friend. Cindy responded to this entry by sharing her similar experience and her thoughts of it:
It was so warm that can receive the mail from a friend you had not contacted for a long time. I have also not sent even a mail to my friends in the senior high school since I am a college student. Sometimes, we make a phone call. But actually, we have been too busy for schoolwork that to concern about other’s resent life. Therefore, you must to treasure this opportunity to keep in touch with your friend. (May 25, Cindy)
In this instance of reciprocal exchange of personal stories, Cindy was arguably making an attempt to connect with her group mates. It can be predicted that once the connection is established, this group rapport will become a motivating power for students to share more ideas and thoughts in their writing.
Misunderstanding arising from interactions. However, misunderstanding can
occur in such interactions. In anticipation of the coming summer vacation, Jenny shared a journal entry in which she solicited good vacation plans:
To remember the last summer vacation, I wasted it to sleep every half-day. I do not want to repeat a failure like last year. Do you have any suggestion or good plan for me? Could you share your good experience of summer vacation for me? (June 6, Jenny)
However, Jenny did not get the answer she expected. Because Jenny mentioned in the same entry a plan to lose weight, Marilyn, one of her group mates, misunderstood the request and offered advice on weight control, rather than suggestions for vacation plans, as solicited by Jenny. Although it was unknown if the other students in the group detected this instance of miscommunication, Jenny’s subsequent response showed that she chose to ignore the misunderstanding. She simply thanked Marilyn for her advice on weight control.
An analysis of their interactions showed that Marilyn’s misreading resulted, in part, from a lack of clarity in the particular entry of Jenny’s. This misunderstanding exemplified the possibility of ineffective and sometimes irrelevant peer feedback. As in all interactions, successful communication in journal exchange depends on a
Yeh: Journal Exchange in a Composition Classroom collaboration of the writer and the reader. The writer should assume the responsibility of sending out clear messages so that it is possible for the reader to make appropriate responses or give constructive feedback.
Findings from Post-Project Questionnaire
Several important issues addressed in the questionnaire were the perceived benefits of reading and responding to peer journals, the perceived benefits of peer feedback, and the students’ preferred feedback methods.
First, most students (80%) claimed that reading their classmates’ journals was helpful. The reasons enumerated were:
1. Reading journals helped them to understand more about their own writing. 2. Reading journals helped them to learn about how other students used English. 3. Reading journals helped them to acquire vocabulary and improve sentence
patterns.
4. Reading journals helped them to know their classmates better. 5. Reading journals helped enhance the pleasure of keeping journals. 6. Reading journals promoted communication of ideas among peers.
Nearly three-quarters of the students (72%) believed that they benefited from peer feedback on their journals. The specific reasons cited were:
1. Peer feedback helped them to learn new vocabulary and expressions. 2. Peer feedback helped them to generate ideas for their own journal writing. 3. Peer feedback helped them to assess the success of their own writing, e.g. they
would know if more details or any improvements were needed. 4. Peer feedback helped to motivate more writing.
5. Good advice was given in feedback. 6. Experiences were shared in feedback.
These acknowledged benefits indicate that the students found language development as well as enjoyment in journal sharing and reading. While they appreciated gaining language knowledge in vocabulary and word usage, the students also savored the enjoyment brought about in the interactions with their peers.
As many as 19 students (76%) chose to respond to their classmates’ journals because they were interested in the topic of a particular entry. Similarly, the same number of students stated that they did not provide feedback on their classmates’ journals because they were not interested in the content of an entry. This finding illustrates the interactive nature of journal exchange. Like real-life communication, students needed to write interestingly and/or effectively enough to earn response and recognition from the audience.
their diary writing or attitudes to journal writing. They indicated three major changes in their journal writing behavior: more attention to grammar, more fun, and less privacy. For example, one student said that she became more careful when she wrote in her journal because she did not want to be ridiculed for poor writing. A number of students acknowledged that journal keeping eventually became as fun an activity as chatting to classmates.
Perhaps the biggest change was that several students refrained from writing about private matters in exchange journals. In fact, prior to the beginning of journal exchange, the students had kept dialogue journals with their teacher for some time. They were aware that the teacher read each one of their journal entries. In other words, the journals that they kept for the composition course were never entirely private. Nevertheless, when interacting with the teacher, students might see journal writing as an assignment that existed mostly as a form of practice. Through feedback from peers, however, they were alerted to the fact that their writing was now social and public, or at least semi-public in a small group, and that they had an audience to consider when they chose to write about a particular topic with a particular style.
One final important question to be addressed from the questionnaire is the students’ preferred feedback methods. While five students opted for teacher feedback and five for peer feedback, eleven students preferred to have feedback from both sides. Those who preferred teacher feedback enumerated the following reasons:
1. The teacher’s answer was more direct.
2. The teacher gave more constructive response. 3. The teacher provided grammar correction. 4. They learned from the teacher’s language.
Students opted for peer feedback mostly because response from their peers would be more in agreement with their own views.
However, another eleven students enjoyed feedback from both the teacher and their peers. They acknowledged the following advantages of a combination of two feedback sources:
1. It provided more opportunities to improve their writing and to practice expressing ideas.
2. Response from both sides was exciting and gratifying.
3. They could get different opinions from people of different generations. 4. Teacher feedback was useful; peer feedback was fun.
As a whole, the students welcomed both teacher and peer feedback because they represented a perspective from a more knowledgeable person (i.e., the teacher) as well as from their peers. When they appreciated the teacher’s language modeling and individualized advice, students were likely to be more motivated by the camaraderie
Yeh: Journal Exchange in a Composition Classroom generated in journal exchange with their peers. This finding did not run contrary to that from Zhang’s (1995) study, where ESL learners were found to prefer teacher feedback to peer and self-directed feedback. Unlike the students in Zhang’s study, the learners in the current study were not forced to make an exclusive choice between teacher and peer feedback. Understandably, most of them opted for feedback from their teacher and their peers. However, two observations can be reasonably made. On the one hand, the learners’ preference of more, rather than less, feedback proved indirectly their strong interest in and appreciation of as much reader response on their writing as possible. On the other hand, the students’ favorable reception of peer feedback seemed to be able to provide a rationale for similar journal exchange projects to be implemented in EFL contexts.
CONCLUSION AND IMPLICATIONS
This case study examined the written products and students’ views on journal exchange in an EFL context. The analysis of student journals has shown positive signs of emergent audience awareness and the learners’ attempt at establishing rapport within groups. It has also revealed that peer feedback was sometimes ineffective or even irrelevant, due possibly to misreading and subsequent misunderstanding. In addition, the results from the post-project questionnaire have provided rather strong evidence of the learners’ positive attitude toward journal exchange and peer feedback.
This study involved a small sample of 28 English majors at a technological university. Care must be taken in generalizing the current findings to larger and different populations. As mentioned in the previous section, the main purpose of the exchange project was to reduce students’ writing anxiety, to increase writing practice, to enhance fluency, and to boost confidence in their writing abilities. No attempt was made to provide evidence for writing improvement in terms of accuracy or the richness of vocabulary. Nevertheless, a number of areas for consideration when implementing similar journal exchange projects can be suggested from the current study.
Error Correction
A journal writing project is usually designed to reduce writing anxiety and to increase writing practice so as to facilitate students’ writing development. Therefore, unlike an essay assignment, error correction is rarely provided in journal writing. However, most learners have long depended on teacher correction for writing improvement. Several students in this study explicitly wished for more error correction, for example. It is suggested that teachers consider individual differences
when deciding whether to provide error correction. With certain learners, selective error feedback from teachers can be useful in promoting writing accuracy.
Defining the Instructor’s Role
When a teacher considers implementing a journal exchange project in an EFL learning context, she or he may want to decide beforehand the instructor’s role in the project. Active participation on the instructor’s side has both advantages and disadvantages. For example, the teacher can provide language modeling or offer useful suggestions through regular feedback. The instructor can also help cement relationships among group members by encouraging more reticent students to respond to their peers. In addition, modeling appropriate feedback can help promote effective interaction among students. On the other hand, however, too much intervention from the instructor may inhibit students from natural communication and deter students from writing freely.
Issues With Journal Sharing
When students are not used to sharing their writing, keeping and exchanging journals within a small group can be intimidating and discomforting. This discomfort may come from two sources. First, students may not have confidence in their writing and may be wary of peer evaluation. Second, students may not want to share their personal life with classmates that they are not familiar with. In response to these potential problems, the teacher may consider steering away from personal diaries and replace them with reading journals, in which students record their reactions to class readings, for example. Another way to deal with these issues is to allow students to select entries to share with classmates and to invite feedback for these entries only.
A Message From a Student
The following journal entry was written by one of the participants four weeks into the journal exchange project:
Although I did not like to keep a diary before, I start to enjoy writing diaries and response to classmates recently. I think exchanging diary is a kind of interesting way to make us keep a diary. Every time I check out my mail box, I will expect to receive diaries or response from classmate, although we did not response often. Comparing with writing diaries before, we do not write only to teacher anymore, we increase to four persons to share experiences each other. Therefore, I have more interesting to write diaries. In order to make our exchanging diary become more interactive, I will response more as possible as I can. I hope we will have a well interaction in next three weeks until final exam. (May 25, Cindy)
Yeh: Journal Exchange in a Composition Classroom errors. However, if we look beyond the errors, we can see several features that are very encouraging to a writing teacher, such as reflection, growing interest in writing and determination to keep writing. While the student acknowledged that she did not originally like the idea of diary keeping, she later started to enjoy it because of the interests in the journal exchange project. She also recognized that the “fun” of journal exchange was in the lively interactions within the peer response groups. Therefore, in order to “have fun” in journal exchange, she was determined to respond more often and to participate more actively in the project.
It seems that journal exchange has found an avid supporter and a satisfactory closing note here.
REFERENCES
Allison, D. (1998). Investigating learners’ course diaries as explorations of language.
Language Teaching Research, 2, 24-47.
Bailey, K. M. (1990). The use of diary studies in teacher education programs. In J. C. Richards & D. Nunan (Eds.), Second language teacher education (pp. 215-226). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Callister, L. C. (1993). The use of student journals in nursing education: Making meaning out of clinical experience. Journal of Nursing Education, 32, 185-186.
Carson, G. C., & Nelson, G. L. (1996). Chinese students’ perceptions of ESL peer response group interaction. Journal of Second Language Writing, 5, 1-19.
Daloglu, A. (2000). Fostering reflective teaching from the start: Journal keeping in preservice teacher education. In J. Burton & M. Carroll (Eds.), Journal writing (pp. 87-100). Alexandria, VA: Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages. Goettsch, K. (2001). On-line journals: Creating community and competency in
writing. In J. Burton & M. Carroll (Eds.), Journal writing (pp. 71-83). Alexandria, VA: Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages.
Holmes, V. L., & Moulton, M. R. (1997). Dialogue journals as an ESL learning strategy. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 40, 616-621.
Neff, G., Beyerlein, S., Apple, D., & Krumsieg, K. (1995, October). Transforming engineering education from a product to a process. In Proceedings of the World
Conference on Engineering Education, St. Paul, MN. Retrieved December 5, 2003,
from http://technology.calumet.purdue.edu/met/gneff/Publications/wcee95/WCEE.html Pagnucci, G. S. (1998). TechJournals: Electronic journal keeping for the technical
writing classroom. In T. Fulwiler & S. Gardner (Eds.), The journal book: For
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Peyton, J. K., & Reed, L. (1990). Dialogue journal writing with nonnative English
speakers: A handbook for teachers. Alexandria, VA: Teachers of English to
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Yeh, C. (2004a, November). Journal exchange in an EFL writing classroom. Paper presented at the Thirteenth International Symposium and Book Fair on English Teaching, Chien Tan Overseas Youth Activity Center, Taipei, Taiwan.
Yeh, C. (2004b, June). Journal writing in the learning of second language writing. Paper presented at the annual meeting of International Symposium on Language Education, Southern Taiwan University of Technology, Tainan, Taiwan.
Zhang, S. (1995). Reexamining the affective advantage of peer feedback in the ESL writing class. Journal of Second Language Writing, 4, 209-222.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chun-Chun Yeh is Assistant Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature, National Chung Cheng University. Her research interests are second language writing and English for academic purposes.
Yeh: Journal Exchange in a Composition Classroom
Appendix A
Sample Journal Entries
From: Jenny
Recently, everyone are busy for prepare the final exam including me. After the exam will follow the happy summer vacation. I have no big plan during this time except lose my weight. To remember the last summer vacation, I wasted it to sleep every half-day. I do not want to repeat a failure like last year. Do you have any suggestion or good plan for me? Could you share your good experience of summer vacation for me? Thanks for you a lot.
From: Marilyn
Jenny, if you really want to lose you weight. I think you need to do more exercises and eat less food. When I was a senior school student, my friend tries to use the drug to lose her weight. At that time, she lost her weight, but after one month, she felt her stomach was hurt by the drugs. In this case, I want to tell you never try to use the drug to lose your weight, it is unhealthy. Maybe I didn’t give good suggestions to lose your weight, but it is advice for you. I also hope you can finish your plan in the summer vacation.
From: Jenny
Thanks for your idea. I will try my best to lose my weight but not eat any drugs. Hope I can seccess to lose my weight.
Appendix B
Questionnaire on Journal Exchange
1. 你覺得閱讀同學的日誌對你有幫助嗎？ 有，請敘述： 沒有，請敘述： 2. 你曾經收到同學對你的日誌寫作的回覆嗎？ 有，約____次（請續答下一題） 沒有（請跳至第 4 題） 3. 你覺得閱讀同學的回覆對你的日誌寫作有幫助嗎？ 有，請敘述： 沒有，請敘述： 4. 你曾經回覆同學的日誌寫作嗎？ 有，約____次（請續答下一題） 沒有（請跳至第 7 題） 5. 你覺得回覆同學的日誌寫作對你有幫助嗎？ 有，請敘述： 沒有，請敘述： 6. 你回覆同學日誌的動機為何？(可複選) 老師規定 喜歡寫作該篇日誌的同學 對該篇日誌的題材有興趣 其他，請敘述： 7. 同學寫作的日誌，你沒有回覆的最主要原因為何？ 沒時間 對該篇日誌內容不感興趣 跟寫作該篇日誌的同學沒有交情 想跟寫作該篇日誌的同學當面表達我的意見 不知道如何以英語表達我的意見 其他，請敘述： 8. 你覺得你的日誌寫作內容在日誌交換之前與之後有沒有改變？ 有，請敘述： 沒有 9. 你覺得你的日誌寫作態度在日誌交換之前與之後有沒有改變？ 有，請敘述： 沒有 10. 你比較喜歡老師或同學回覆你寫的日誌？ 老師，原因： 同學，原因： 都喜歡，原因： 都不喜歡，原因： 沒意見 11. 整體而言，你喜歡這學期的日誌交換嗎？ 喜歡 沒意見 不喜歡
Yeh: Journal Exchange in a Composition Classroom
