An Empirical Research into Learning Journals in English writing论文

Abstract: This paper focuses on an empirical study of learning journals conducted by college English writing learners with the following factors covered in a typical quantitative study such as research questions, subjects selection, methodology description and the final conclusion.
　　Keywords: Learning journals; empirical study
　　Learning journals, as an important method of self-regulated learning,attracts great attention in the field of English language learning both at home and abroad since the mid 1970s [1]. This paper is depicting a case study of college students’ English writing and trying to find out the functions of learning journals in the course.
　　

1. Research Designing

　　1.1 Objectives of the Study
　　Grounded upon the literature[2-5] about the use of learning journals, the study is designed to address questions as follows.
　　1). As a method of self-regulated learning, can learning journals produce efforts on college students’ English writing?
　　2). If can, what are the functions of learning journals in college students’ English writing?
　　1.

2 Subjects Selection

　　The target population of the study is 71 freshmen from a university in Zhejiang. They are majors of city planning from school of City Construction. Yet the final sample only consisted of 65 cases after the uncompleted and unusable data had been identified. Of the 65 students, 43 were males and 2

2 were females.

　　1.3 Methodology-- Learning Journals
　　The students were asked to write one leaning journals every two weeksby their English writing teacher. Totally they finished 5 journals in one semester. With the help of their English teacher, the current writer collected their learning journals and their compositions. Totally five learning journals and four compositions he been ailable.
　　In order to oid students’ aimless journals writing, the participants in the study were directed to write about or cover the following items in their journals:
　　1). 这次教师批改后发下来的作文我改正的地方有：
　　2). 我想让_____________(老师/同学/我自己)来完善我的作文。具体做法是：
　　3). 下次写新作文前我应该做的工作是：
　　

2. Conclusion

　　2.

1 Inspirations

　　From this research, some inspirations can be summarized as the following.
　　1). According to what is shown in the research, we can see that students believe that building a target is the most important method to learning English writing well. Since setting a target is so important and useful for students to learn English writing, teachers in charge of students’composition should make it a must that their students build a target in the first composition class. Of course teachers can help students decide their targets at the beginning and students can also set another goal when this goal is attained.