THE EFFECT OF THE STUDENT–TEACHER DIALOGUE JOURNAL PRACTICE ON ENGLISH WRITING SKILLS: a QUASI-EXPERIMENTAL STUDY

The aim of this study is to examine the effect of the student–teacher dialogue journal practice, which is used to improve the writing skills of students learning English as a foreign language, on writing performance. The research was conducted using a quasi-experimental design with a pre-test–post-test control group. While the students in the experimental group exchanged written journals with their teacher outside of class for ten weeks, no such practice was implemented in the control group. As the data collection tool, the students’ written products were evaluated using an analytic scoring rubric that considered task completion, organization, grammatical accuracy, lexical knowledge, and overall effect. The findings did not reveal a significant difference in overall writing achievement; however, a significant improvement was observed in the organization dimension in favor of the experimental group. These results suggest that the student–teacher dialogue journal practice can particularly contribute to the development of text organization in writing instruction.