Dialogue Journal: Exploring Its Use to Teach Writing

Abstract

The main objective of this research is to analyze the use of dialogue journal to teach writing. This case study research was conducted at one of senior high school in Cianjur. The research purposively sampling twenty students of grade XI. In order to collect the data, I used three techniques of data collection namely interview, observation, and document analysis.The research findings revealed that: (1) The reasons behind the implementation of dialogue journal were because the teacher wanted to give students opportunity to fulfill the need of reflection and expressing ideas while the belief relied on the standpoint to give non-threatening atmosphere for students to freely express themselves and to give opportunities for teacher to observe students’ progress and their personal background. The procedure of dialogue journal was done five up to seven minutes which involved three parts, those were greeting/ salutation, body, and closing. While, the learning situation was positive in the case of interaction, attitude, and motivation. Students’ responses were classified into open-ended responses which displayed students’ positive thought, feeling, and reaction because they had experienced many advantages in doing dialogue journal as well as silence which indicated the moment when the students reduced interaction to only center their attention in writing dialogue journal; (2) Teacher’s difficulties in doing dialogue journal were managing time to handle with students’ dialogue journal overload and responding to super active students. Whereas, students’ difficulties in doing dialogue journal were writing in limited time, finding suitable vocabulary, using correct grammar, and responding as well as giving suggestions to the questions given by the teacher; and (3) To cope with such difficulties, the teacher should manage a schedule to be able to correct students’ work and respond to the students’ questions. Furthermore, students’ difficulties in doing dialogue journal could be solved by giving more language skills input, doing peer correction, and encouraging autonomous learning.Keywords: Dialogue Journal, Use, Teach Writing.