Teachers and Students’ Perceptions about the Relevance of Journal Writing in Enhancing Students’ Writing Skill The case of Third Year EFL Students at Mila University Centre

Abstract

Writing is a central skill which plays a crucial role in language teaching and learning. It is one of the skills that should be mastered by students. However, writing is also considered as a complex skill that requires practice and efforts due to the difficulties that students find when producing a piece of writing especially in a foreign language. In addition, it is hard to master all the aspects of writing which lead to produce acceptable compositions. Although, students have had an experience with the writing skill for a long period, there might be no remarkable improvement in their writing proficiency. That is why teachers should find strategies which could help students in writing through their guidance, encouragement, motivation and feedback. In doing so, journal writing is supposed to be a good technique to enhance students‟ writing skill. In this research, we aim to explore the impact of journal writing on developing students‟ writing skill as reported in the literature, and to see how the perceptions of both teachers and students could change their positions in relation to the incorporation of this technique in teaching and learning writing. We hypothesized that teachers‟ awareness of the relevance of writing journals in enhancing the writing skill(s) would lead them to incorporate it in teaching writing. In addition, we relied on two means of research: a questionnaire and an interview. Two questionnaires are delivered to both students and teachers, as we did with the interview to both teachers and students. The results obtained from the interview and the questionnaire show that most students find that writing is a difficult task but interesting since they encounter various problems when performing their writing task. Also, all the teachers try to motivate students to write outside the classroom but not necessary to write journals. The teachers and the students have good attitudes towards the use of writing journal as a tool to improve writing proficiency. However, most of the teachers do not incorporate this technique due to time limitations.