Journal Writing

 The Student Journal has always been a very valuable instructional device in my teaching practice. It can serve a variety of educational purposes, such as to improve writing skills (for me it's a priority!); to remind the students of essential things to remember from the lessons; to monitor the students' progress; to record new knowledge gained each day or what the students experienced in class; to stimulate and strengthen self-reflection skills. Journal is a most commonly used by students but occasionally handed in o the teacher notebook. My students chose their notebooks of different formats, sizes, and colors, and the most important point here is that they consider it their own privacy or inner world, in which the teacher sometimes intrudes. I usually scan my students' journals at certain intervals, make some relevant comments and sometimes make slight corrections of the most overused or 'abused' grammar, spelling and punctuation mistakes. Our journal assignments are relevant to the program topics discussed in class. I also ask my students to answer specific, open-ended questions, which my students surprisingly enjoy most. Moreover, Student Journal is another way of creating teacher-student dialogue, when each can ask the other questions. I like reading and commenting my students' writings more than any of their required or obligatory tasks in class. They, at the same time, seem to react positively to their journal writing since it's not graded (though it's not true.. I include journal writings into Formative Assessment), and they can express their idea freely, without any hostile feeling of being judged. It's interesting to observe how journals bring the students closer to you, Teacher.