Dia-Logging

In reflection on David Schwarzer's "Student and Teacher Strategies for Communicating through Dialogue Journals in Hebrew: A Teacher Research Project."

It was interesting to read in the introduction that the objective of this paper was not to prove effectiveness of dialogue journals on acquisition of a foreign language. Instead, the research article looked into the ways in which students and teachers were using dialogue journals to supplement other language learning activities. The practice seemed to help produce a relationship between the student and the teacher, which Schwarzer mentioned. One example of him making the students more comfortable with the written Hebrew language was to use "block letters" until the students became comfortable enough to choose to use script writing in the journals. He let them lead, but also somehow managed to challenge them enough that they expected this higher level of themselves. The students used codeswitching and translation as a way to communicate and to help themselves understand.