page_title: Dialogue journal
section_title: Reading
hierarchical_section_title: Dialogue journal / Reading
caption_attribution_description: English: Teacher writing with a student about a story they have read
context_page_description: A dialogue journal is an ongoing written interaction between two people to exchange experiences, ideas, or reflections. It is used most often in education as a means of sustained written interaction between students and teachers at all education levels. It can be used to promote second language learning and learning in all areas.
  Dialogue journals are used in many schools as a form of communication between teachers and students to improve the life that they share in the classroom by exchanging ideas and shared topics of interest, promoting writing in a non-evaluative context, and promoting student engagement with learning. They are also used between teachers and teacher trainers to provide professional development opportunities and improve teaching.
  Dialogue journal interaction occurs in notebooks, letters, email exchanges, Internet-based interactions, and audio journals. The important feature is that two people are communicating with each other, about topics and issues of interest to both, and the interaction continues over time.
context_section_description: In dialogue journal interactions, reading and writing are integrated as communicative activities. A few researchers have directly explored the value of dialogue journal writing for developing and assessing reading competence, especially for students acquiring English as a second language and in literature and reading classes with developing readers. One question about the writing it to what extent, and in what ways, it serves as a reading text.
  Walworth described the use of dialogue journals to individualize instruction for profoundly deaf college students in advanced college-level reading classes. The written interactions with her students, still struggling with reading and writing in English, provided her with an immediate, ongoing assessment of individual levels of comprehension. Walworth's analysis shows the growth of student comprehension, as student entries began to predict and clarify story plot and character relationships and get at the "deep reasoning" of the characters in the novels. She argues that the teacher/student interactions provide students with opportunities to "try out ideas" and explore the edges of their comprehension, taking the risks that advanced adult reading requires. Walworth's analysis demonstrates how a teacher and a student can work together, first to determine the student's schema or background knowledge and then to make use of it to promote understanding of the meaning of the text.
  Studies with hearing students learning English in university courses find similar patterns, with the writing of the teacher providing continuity and coherence to ideas discussed, flow to the writing, and mutual understanding of ideas.
  Shuy conducted a case study of a profoundly deaf student's dialogue journal entries in high school to assess the student's growth in reading comprehension over time. He identified five specific features of the student's responses to the teacher's entries that demonstrate comprehension: (1) propositional statements, (2) questions, (3) appropriate inferences, (4) appropriate responses to opinions, and (5) requests for clarification. Shuy argues that dialogue journals can be used as a more accurate assessment of student text comprehension than decontextualized standardized tests of comprehension, particularly for students from a completely different first language context (e.g., American Sign Language).
  Several studies by Atwell and others have described the use of dialogue journals as opportunities for students and a teacher to discuss books that students are reading. These studies focus on the role of interactional dialogues in expanding students' awareness of and engagement with books and authors, with the goal of taking readers deeper into written texts. Atwell points out that dialogue journal interactions create the zone of proximal development, in which "mediated learning" can occur, as an expert reader cooperates with a less experienced one to construct meaning from a text. Atwell found that the dialogue journal conversations (1) encouraged students to connect fiction to their own lives; (2) encouraged reflection on themselves as readers, making them conscious of how they learned to read, which included process and rituals; and (3) developed awareness of character, plot, and book structure. Atwell described how the ongoing dialogue changed her written responses from asking "test questions" (questions to which the teacher already knows the answer) to a pattern of offering advice only when asked, and using "nudging" comments to expand students' awareness of meaning and of strategies for understanding written text.
  Werderich conducted a grounded theory study of middle school teachers' responses to their students, as they scaffolded students' literacy understandings. Werderich's analysis provides evidence for reading as a dynamic thinking event, in which the teacher's feedback, modeling of interpretative responses, and reflective questions facilitate the development of student comprehensions of text.
  Fallon, Wilson, and Wells describe how writing with adult English language learne
caption: Teacher writing with a student about a story they have read
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