The Use of Journal Writing Project in Promoting University Students’ Literacy

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to study the use of journal writing project in promoting university students’ literacy and to investigate the strengths and weakness of such project. This research used the qualitative method and collected the data through interview, questionnaire, and observation. For analyzing qualitative data, the researcher used constant comparative method. During the 12-weeks an English Graduate lecture attended by 23 students was selected as the subject of the study. The students were required to work in a pair and to pass three steps in journal writing project involving conducting a mini research, writing a manuscript, and sitting for final test. The study revealed that journal writing project can promote the students’ literacy. In addition, the implementation of this project had several strengths, such as the students’ frequency of reading increased, students were accustomed to write their ideas, students could practice the theories directly, the students were trained to conduct research and send the results of the study to the internal journal. In constrast, the weakness of this project was the students were required to acquire the basic knowledge of journal writing techniques first. Consequently, it needed a long time to conduct this learning process.