Making sense of second language acquisition theories: Insights from student journals

I began lecturing a paper on second language acquisition (SLA) in the first semester of 2002. Bartels' (2002) article, which challenged second language teacher educators to do research on their own teaching of theory courses within second language teacher education programmes, appeared shortly afterwards. This was about the same time that I was realising the amount of work involved in responding to students' weekly journals. Having been a teacher for many years with a background in action research and with Bartels'challenge ringing in my ears, it seemed particularly relevant to investigate the effectiveness of journal writing in helping students come to grips with the ideas and theories involved in SLA. In particular I wanted to investigate how I was scaffolding their understandings by making connections to their backgrounds and also to their foregrounds as potential language teachers.