JOURNALS IN THE LANGUAGE CLASSROOM
Scott J. Baxter
In this article I describe some of the ways that journals can be used as teaching tools in the language classroom; in fact, the suggestions I make could be applied to the use of journals in teaching just about any subject. I begin by describing the concept of writing to learn, which is the theoretical foundation that journals are based on. After that, I give practical advice for using journals in the classroom. Next, I share my own advice and present feedback about journals from students at the American University of Bulgaria. Finally, I end with specific suggestions for how journals might be used at different moments during a lesson.
Writing to learn
One way to begin is by thinking about the concept of writing to learn. But, rather than starting with a definition of the concept, I would like to start with a thought experiment. Suppose someone asked you to grab a piece of paper and jot down an answer to the question, “What things are important to you as a teacher?” What would you say? Perhaps you would write about the things you want your students to learn. Or maybe you would write about the sort of atmosphere you like to have in your classroom. Or perhaps you would write about the factors that led to your becoming a teacher.
If you had, in fact, grabbed a piece of paper and jotted down some information, you would have been doing a type of writing called writing to learn. Writing to learn is thinking as you write. And this thinking as you write is the kind of writing that happens when people keep journals.
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.
Writing to learn is usually contrasted with writing to communicate. Writing to communicate is the sort of graded writing that is typically assigned in classrooms. According to Young (1999), there are several key differences between writing to learn and writing to communicate: (1) writing to learn emphasizes discovery thinking, as opposed to critical thinking; (2) the emphasis is on developing ideas rather than revising, crafting, or clarifying; (3) the writing is designed to make sense primarily to the writer, rather than to a reader; (4) the audience is the self and trusted others, rather than a distant audience; (5) the language can be personal, rather than academic and formal; (6) the teacher plays the role of mentor or coach rather than judge; and (7) forms include journals, blogs, and rough drafts rather
than graded essays, reports, or business letters.
This list is one way to think about how writing to learn and writing to communicate differ. Another way to think about what writing to learn is has been illustrated by Casanave and Sosa (2008):
[A] second language student, bored by textbook exercises, longs to be challenged by something more interesting, which almost always means something more
difficult and more interactive and almost always something outside the conventional school setting. c But if she is doing this in her L2, she must hold to a belief that may make her fearful at first—she must believe that she does not have to wait until her language is error-free in order to transform her experiences and complex thoughts into lines of words. The lines do not need to be long. The grammar does not need to be perfect. c She also needs to be convinced that there is a receptive audience consisting of other people who are interested in what she has to say. (92)
(...)
(http://exchanges.state.gov/englishteaching/forum/archives/docs/09-47-4-e.pdf)
The classroom activity proposed by the article is in accordance with a teaching methodology whose focus is