Topics 2
Journals in the Language classroom
Definition:
Journal writing is an incredibly flexible instructional tool, useful across the entire curriculum. While often used as a class startup activity, it is used primarily to give students an opportunity to speculate on paper, confident that their ideas, observations, emotions, and writing will be accepted without criticism.
Writing to learn:
Journal writing is an incredibly flexible instructional tool, useful across the entire curriculum. While often used as a class startup activity, it is used primarily to give students an opportunity to speculate on paper, confident that their ideas, observations, emotions, and writing will be accepted without criticism. Writing to learn is based on the assumption that students’ thoughts and understanding can grow and clarify through the process of writing. And growth in thought and understanding can certainly happen in the foreign language classroom.
How to do a classroom Journal:
2. The language of the journal could be English, but it could also be their first language (L1). Or it could be a mixture of both. For advanced students, it makes sense to have them use the target language. For beginners, a journal in their native language might be a place where they can express their feelings without having to worry about remembering difficult grammar or vocabulary.
3. Collect and read the journals on a regular basis—but do not correct. If you feel you should respond, then write about something you liked. Remember that “in a language class, in the end, everything boils down to the same question: Can you use language in ways that allow you to convey whatever your thoughts are? … Can you express something about yourself, your ideas, your curiosities, and questions?”
4. Ask students to leave a blank page between entries for room to comment later. Class time could be devoted to having students read and reread entries and respond to what they have written. In my experience, students really enjoy having a chance to comment on their own growth and development in the journal.
5. Encourage students to write about a wide variety of topics, but the topics should always, at least in some way, connect with the class. In his book, Engaging Ideas, John Bean suggests that one way to begin class is to ask students to discuss a question that they wrote about the night before in their journals. Such a question might be “What confused you about today’s reading or class?”
6. Keep a journal along with your students. Ask your students to write during class time, and write along with them. Writing with your students tells them that the teacher takes the idea of journals seriously, and so should they. Keeping a journal along with your students also helps you see how much time is needed to complete a task, helps you be more reasonable with what you expect, and gives you a clue as to how interesting the prompts are that you give to your students.
7. Look for ways to use the journal during class time. Even if you can find only five minutes per week of class time, that time could be used for journal writing. Look for ways to connect the journal with what you consider important in the class. In the final section of this paper, I suggest specific journal writing activities.
The benefits:
- Sort out experiences, solve problems and consider varying perspectives.
- Examine relationships with others and the world.
- Reflect on personal values, goals, and ideals.
- Summarize ideas, experience, and opinions before and after instruction.
- Witness his academic and personal growth by reading past entries.
By reading journal entries, teachers get to know students':
- anxieties
- problems
- excitements
- joys
The negatice sffects:
Use of journals does have two possible downsides, including:
1. The potential for the teacher to hurt students' feelings with criticism.
Remedy: Offer constructive criticism rather than a critique.
2. The loss of instructional time needed to teach course material.
Instructional time can be conserved by simply limiting journal writing to five or ten minutes a period.
Another approach to conserving time, however, is to assign journal topics relating to the instructional topic of the day.
Journals Topics:
Find over a hundred journal topics in these four lists:
1-Self Inderstanding and Clarifying Thoughts and Positions
Topics dealing with various aspects of "who I am, why I'm that way, what I value, and what I believe."
2-Interpersonal Relationships
Topics
dealing with "what I want in a friend, who are my friends, what I
expect of friends, and how I relate to family members, teachers, and
other significant people in my life."
3-Speculation and viewing from a different prespective:
Topics
causing the writer to predict or see things from an unusual
perspective. These may be highly creative, such as "describe the events
of yesterday from the perspective of your hair."
Conclusion:
Students certainly could keep electronic journals in the form of a blog or a wiki, or through email. However, paper-based notebooks offer a number of attractive features. A paper journal does not require electricity or an Internet connection. A paper journal is lighter and more portable than most computers. And while paper journals can be destroyed in rain or fire, people never lose an entry due to a computer virus or hard drive failure.
Paper-based journals also offer an additional advantage: they bring mind and body closer together.
Certainly journals will not work for everyone, but, for many students and teachers, journals offer an opportunity to find a personal connection with the course material.
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