An Action Research On Improving High School Students’ Writing Performances Through Reflective Journal Keeping

Recently, a self-reflective method is mentioned in many studies---reflective journal keeping.According to research findings, keeping reflective journal can promote students’ self-monitor,self-reflection and self-evaluation level. Besides, many act researches prove that it can help studentsimprove their learning performances. Thus the author implements this action research to findspecific changes of students’ writing performances in her class. This study could provide someguidance to the use of reflective journal keeping among high school students.The author does this research in a high school in Zibo City.43senior two students attend thisaction research. With this study, the author will answer the flowing three questions:(1). What arehigh school students’ attitudes towards reflective journal keeping?(2). How do high schoolstudents’ English writing performances change after reflective journal keeping?(3). How do highschool students’ attitudes towards English writing change after reflective journal keeping? Studentswho took part in this action research are required to keep a reflective journal in the writing classonce a week. On their journals, they should reflect on their problems, and make plans to solve theirproblems. The author uses one questionnaire, three tests, and two face-to-face interviews asinstruments. After the research, the author uses the quantitative analysis to analyze these students’test score and questionnaire, and uses qualitative analysis to analyze the contents of the twoface-to-face interviews.According to the result, reflective journal keeping has positive effects on students’ writingperformances. Firstly, most of high school students show positive attitudes towards reflectivejournal keeping, but still some students don’t want to keep it; secondly, with reflective journalkeeping, high school students make obvious progress in their overall writing proficiency; thirdly,with reflective journal keeping, high school students develop their consciousness in using writingstrategies.