Self Expressive Writers

Student journal writing can connect reading, writing, and discussing through activities that accommodate diverse learning styles and that further students' linguistic development. The various uses of journal writing can be incorporated into one compact student notebook. A notebook for an English class might consist of a dialogue journal as a preface, a literary journal as the body of the notebook, and a subject journal as the glossary. By keeping a dialogue journal, a "conversation in print" with the teacher, students develop during a semester from self-expressive writers to expressively communicative writers. By keeping a literary journal (a written record of personal responses to passages from literature) students read actively, responding throughout their reading. A subject journal, a record of written responses to expository texts, could serve as the glossary of the student notebook by including: (1) responses to background readings such as biographies, histories, and genre students; (2) a personalized dictionary of literary and linguistic terms for investigation; and (3) a personalized stylebook of rhetorical, grammatical, and mechanical concerns.