Dialogue Journals in the Multilingual Classroom: Building Language Fluency and Writing Skills Through Written Interaction

This volume focuses on the use of dialogue journals in classrooms with students from diverse language and cultural backgrounds whose proficiency with spoken and written English is limited. The companion volume to Dialogue Journal Communication (Ablex, 1988), it carefully describes, from a teacher’s experience, how dialogue journal writing can be effectively implemented in the multilingual classroom, with practical tips for starting and maintaining the practice, exploiting the benefits, and avoiding the pitfalls. It presents a model of researchers working in close collaboration with teachers and shows the development in the journals of individual students, with extended examples of student and teacher writing so that teachers can see research results that are not hopelessly extracted from the context in which they were produced. At the same time, it has a strong research orientation.