Abstract
Dialogue journals are useful pedagogical tools for developing communicative written fluency. While instructors often respond to student writing by modeling, questioning and providing feedback, visual aids are also sometimes used to enhance communication. In this study, findings from an examination of 12 adult English Language Learners’ dialogue journals reveal that the instructor demonstrated an understanding of visual aids, which included instructor-drawn pictures and textual enhancements. Some students responded with hand-drawn pictures of their own and noted that visuals increased their interest in writing and helped them to understand unfamiliar topics. The use of instructor-drawn pictures and textual enhancements as a part of dialogue journals facilitates communication and strengthens the rapport-building for which dialogue journals are well-known.
Highlights
Dialogue journals allow English Language Learners (ELLs) to focus on communication in second language writing without a preoccupation with accuracy
Since Werderich’s (2006) definition for visual aids is limited to procedural reinforcements, we propose a modification to the definition of visual aids in the above model to include drawing and textual enhancements
While students did not prompt the instructor with visual aids used in conjunction with other response facilitators, they usually responded to his efforts to engage them
Summary
Dialogue journals allow English Language Learners (ELLs) to focus on communication in second language writing without a preoccupation with accuracy. Teachers have long provided feedback to student writers through the use of textual markups like underlining, circling, using a different colouredpen (usually red!), writing marginal comments and the like (Ferris, 2014), but such enhancements are typically utilized for corrective feedback; here we differentiate between this traditional function and the role of textual enhancements in facilitating student-teacher dialogue. Such visual aids may make a difference in the understanding and rapport building that takes place in dialogue journal writing. The results shed light on how teacher-drawn pictures and textual enhancements (as defined above) can be used as response facilitators
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