Dialogue Writing: Analysis of Student-Teacher Interactive Writing in the Learning of English as a Second Language.

A study of the dialogue journal writing of six sixth grade students of English as a Second Language (ESL) examines the interaction with the teacher. The subjects had been in the United States for less than a year, and came from Korean, Vietnamese/Chinese, Burmese, and Italian language backgrounds. Data for the study were drawn from the students' dialogue journals and classroom observations and from interviews with the teacher and each student. The study is divided into three sections. In the first, dialogue journal interaction is placed within the classroom context, as a multilingual classroom management tool, and each student is profiled. The second section contains studies of the journal text, focusing on various aspects of discourse, including teacher strategies to promote student participation, teacher's questions, characteristics of the language input students receive in the teacher's entries, and patterns in the language functions used by the teacher and students. The third section documents the students' use of English grammatical morphemes, compares it with patterns found in previous studies of ESL morphology, and analyzes it across the ten months of writing in the journals. In addition, the linguistic factors influencing the use of the morphemes and the importance of individual learner strategies and language background in patterns of morpheme use are examined, and analytical issues are discussed. (MSE)