In Cohen & Ishihara 2005, e-journaling allowed both learner and researcher to reflect upon strategies and materials in order to fine-tune their practice. E-journaling also provided the researchers with a qualitative information that could be compared to the quantitative information they were collecting to assess in terms of convergent validity. They were able to investigate learner performance around themes identified by examining the e-journals themselves. They used content analysis designed to describe learner attitudes (reception of) the materials. In a classroom situation this would provide instructors with some access to learner affect.
The researchers were able to draw both from explicit statements about the materials as well as make inferences upon the same themes given less direct comments. The kinds of insights into strategic learning and the nature of Japanese pragmatics that one would hope to see in such e-journaling were not as pervasive as one might hope. There were only a few examples provided in the article of students wrote about "misconceptions about language and culture that were eliminated through studying the material" and "insights applied to other speech acts" (Cohen & Ishihara, p. 16).
One way that this kind of e-journaling could be expanded in a Second Language environment would be to ask students to attempt using the skills taught in the classroom or though internet modules in real world situations and writing about their experiences. To encourage attention to particular pragmatic features of the language, students could be asked to record in their e-journals interactions with or between native speakers that include these features. This could be done easily with speech acts. It would allow an environment in which students could raise issues and instructors would be able to identify trends and respond to the class as a whole.
Using speech acts that are appropriate to the target culture often requires that learners work against the instincts and intuitions that they have unconsciously developed in their L1 (or has been drilled into them in childhood). E-journaling provided a way of processing such disjunctions. One participant reflected upon his resistance to “telling a white-lie” presumably because the strategy is more frequently used in Japanese than English (Cohen & Ishihara, p.24).
If one is trying to teach students to be reflective about their own language learning strategies and performance in order for them to refine their practice, e-journaling seems to be a logical tool. How well it would work in most classrooms would probably depend upon the attitudes of the students towards the exercise of e-journaling, the classroom dynamic, and instructor’s ability to facilitate such an enterprise.
Unfortunately, this study does not include extensive information about the process of setting up the journals. It would be valuable to see what kind of prompts the students were responding to (did they differ from entry to entry?) and how they were introduced to the process.
