1. The Effect of Dialogue
Journals on an ELL
Student’s Writing Skills
Davina Chu
Dr. Kristen Stephens
EDUC110
30 April 2009

2. Case Study
• Annie is a third grade, Spanish-speaking ELL student
from El Salvador.
• She struggles most with reading and writing
comprehension and scored low on the benchmark
tests.
• According to her teacher, Annie has a tendency to skip
details or abruptly switch topics without elaboration or
transitions and also struggles with sentence structure
in her writing.
• From her quarterly portfolio assessments and general
observation, Annie is clearly a hard worker and desires
to improve all areas of knowledge.

3. Research Question
• To what extent will the integration of dialogue
journals between teacher and an ELL student
affect the student’s writing skills?
• This study aimed to apply the effective
intervention strategy of dialogue journals to this
specific population of ELL students in hopes to
increase their motivation and capabilities in
writing.

4. Methodology
• Baseline Data (5 days)
• Five samples of Annie’s writing from Morning Pages, Writer’s Workshop, and
Research were collected and scored on a scale from 1-4 based on the
number of errors made.
• Teacher observations tallied how many times Annie asked for help with
grammar or elaboration and reasoning, and how many times Annie was
asked to refocus on her writing assignment.
• The cooperating teacher was interviewed for a progress report on Annie’s
writing since the beginning of the year.
• Dialogue Journal Intervention (10 days)
• Ten dialogue journal entries were collected between teacher and Annie and
scored using the same scale as the writing samples.
• Five more samples of Annie’s writing from Morning Pages, Writer’s Workshop,
and Research were collected and scored.
• Teacher observations tallied how many times Annie asked for help with
grammar or elaboration and reasoning, and how many times Annie was
asked to refocus on her writing assignment.
• The cooperating teacher was interviewed again for an updated progress
report on Annie’s writing since the beginning of the year.

5. Results
Annie behaviorally improved in her Annie also made less errors in her
responses. With the intervention, writing in comparison to her baseline
Annie asked for less help and stayed scores prior to the intervention.
focused and motivated.
Observations of Student Writing Sample Scores
Behavior 3.5
Average Writing Sample Score
3
5
Average Number of Tally Makrs (per day)
4.5
2.5
4
3.5 2
3
1.5
2.5
2
1
1.5
1 0.5
0.5
0
0
Dialogue Other Work
Grammar Reasoning and Motivation
Journal
Elaboration
Behavior Response Baseline Intervention
Writing Sample
Baseline (5 days) Intervention (10 days)

6. Conclusion
• The dialogue journal intervention in this study was
effective in increasing Annie’s writing abilities such
as grammar and motivation to write.
• However, there was little evidence to support that
Annie is writing with more details and elaborating
on an already existing idea.
• Future implications:
• Work with a larger sample size
• Continue the study for more than ten days