An investigation into the effects of keeping journals of preparatory class instructors on teaching paragraph writing within the notion of reflective practice

The main purpose of this study was to see the reflective practices of the participants with the help of journal writing in a period of time. For this reason, 11 instructors from School of Foreign Languages at a private university were participated in the study voluntarily for four weeks. After that, an interview was conducted with each participant to see the effects of keeping a journal while teaching paragraph writing.Qualitative research was used for this study. After the related review of literature had been examined, the research questions were decided. The items and the questions in the journal forms were prepared in terms of teaching paragraph writing. All of these questions were revised by two interraters, one of whom was a native speaker of English and the other one was a field expert. While some parts were omitted, some others were added. The last form was checked by the researcher and given to the participants to be filled in. Moreover, the interview questions were prepared and revised by the same interraters again. 4 weeks later, the researcher interviewed with all the participants one by one.When the necessary data was collected, the analysis process started and content analysis was preferred for the study. All the answers were compiled and coded by constant comparison method. These codes were reviewed by two other native speaker instructors who were not the participants of the study. After the codes were reshaped again, first the journal forms, then the interviews were interpreted in order to find the answer of the research questions. Finally, some conclusions were obtained and some suggestions for further research were presented.