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Hello Everyone!

I'm thinking about adding a journaling assignment to my curriculum this year, and I wanted to hear some opinions, ideas, criticisms, etc. on the subject.  I'm conflicted about parameters for the assignments, namely:  1.)  leave topics up to students or assign writing topics, and 2.)  1-2 entries per week vs. 5-6 entries per week (daily.) 

If I leave topics open, I'm afraid lower leveled students will be too intimidated.  If I assign topics, I'm worried it will limit what they are willing to write about.  As for the frequency, I plan to collect, read (whatever is not marked private), and respond to the students.  It's a lot of work for me, I know, since I have about 300 students.  However, I think it would we really useful in opening them and practicing communication skills.  Plus, I can indirectly correct grammar mistakes by responding using correct forms (as opposed to marking up their papers with red ink.)  If I do 1-2 entries a week, it may or may not be easier for me to respond to what they write.  However, shorter, daily entries would make them think in English more often.  Which do you think is less intimidating? 

Besides those issues, I'd love to hear any other input anyone might have on the subect of journaling to improve conversational skills. 

Thanks!! 

I'm not sure if you've thoroughly thought through just how long it takes to make journals...

My students do weekly journals and it is difficult to mark more than 40 journals per day because of the level of concentration required.  I only mark 85 journals per week and it takes me the better part of the week so 300 is, in my opinion, a bit too ambitious.  If the students will be divided into levels this year, I'd assign weekly journals and only for the higher level students.  Writing a journal entry is intimidating for students with very low level skills in any language.  If they are low level beginners, you will find that most of them will either not submit a journal entry or they will plagiarise something from the internet.  Diaries would actually be easier for these students while journals would be more challenging for higher level students.

As for the topics, I give them a list of possible topics to help the students who find it intimidating to choose their own topics but most of my kids choose a topic of their own anyway.  I've attached the list that I use with the first graders since my students' level of English is very high compared to most other high schools.

@Jozigirl:  Thanks for the input  .  Acutally, in the last 2 years I have assigned writing assignments on a fairly regular basis.  I was checking specifically for grammar then, which took up a lot of time.  So, I understand what you mean by being overly ambitious.  However, because they were lists of conversation questions or paragraph topics, many students simply plagarized eachother.  I was thinking journals/ diaries would be more interesting for them (and me), because they wouldn't be as structured, and they won't have to worry about their mistakes.  They can just write and practice organizing their ideas in English.  Plus, if I make it open-ended, they can just write about whatever they're comfortable with.  Hopefully, my replies will open up some more interesting dialogues.  Thanks for the list of topic ideas, too!

@Andyroo:  Both, actually.  For their regular placements, they are categorized by "Navigation" (the higher level students) and "Engineering" (the lower levels.)  For my (and their other) English class, they are in English-ability leveled classes.  The freshman were leveled last year, also (which was the first time they'd tried that here.)  However, my co-teacher doesn't really think things through or discuss anything with me to where I can understand what's going on; so the whole setup seems to be for show (like a lot of other things here.)  I don't know if they expect me to lower and raise the difficulty of the material according to the levels or not.  Last year, all freshman learned the same thing, like every other year before that.  So, I'm not sure what to do with it yet.  I usually short for the middle, though.  Obviously, it would benefit the students more if I taught all of them just above their respective levels; but that's going to make things exponentially more difficult for me to organize since I already do everything myself, including creating my curriculum and lessons.