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.