DIARY KEEPING IN ENGLISH LESSONS

In this study, the diaries kept both by the students and the teacher were used as a research tool in order to learn what makes a language lesson good or bad and find out the difficulties experienced by the students. For this purpose, both the students at a state primary school and their English language teacher kept diaries during the English classes for one term. In addition to the diary entries, they kept notes and filled in charts prepared by the researcher. The study included 47 students at 7th grade. The diaries were collected on weekly basis for 13 weeeks. The entries were first analyzed without focusing on any subject. In the second analysis, the most repeated items related to the research questions were identified and they were grouped under some specific titles. While 9 groups emerged from the analysis of the teacher’s entries, 6 groups emerged from the analysis of the students’ entries.