The effect of diary writing on primary school 4th grade students' writing skills

The aim of this study is to examine the effects of diary writing on the writing skills of 4th grade primary school students. The study was conducted using a quasi-experimental design with a control group pretest-posttest design. The participants of the study were 102 students studying in two different primary schools in Tepebaşı District of Eskişehir. Before the research, writing skills of the students in the experimental and control groups were measured. Then, the students in the experimental group were asked to write a diary regularly for two months. At the end of two months, the writing skills of the students in the experimental and control groups were measured again. The "Writing Skill Assessment Form (Şahin, 2021)", "Written Expression Checklist for Primary School 4th Grade (Kuşdemir & Bulut, 2018)" and "Scoring Instruction that can be used to evaluate the texts written by primary school students in terms of spelling and punctuation (Kuşdemir & Bulut, 2018)" were used as data collection tools. As a result of the research, it was concluded that there was a significant improvement in the written expression skills and the level of formal improvement of the texts written by the experimental group students who kept a regular diary compared to the control group. On the other hand, no significant difference was found between the experimental and control groups at the level of errors such as spelling and punctuation rules and the way letters are written, which are thought to be due to lack of knowledge. We think that the findings obtained will contribute to the literature examining the effects of journaling on writing skills.