Reflective Journal Writing as an Effective Technique in the Writing Process*

This study assessed the benefits of keeping reflective journal writing on improving English writing skills, increasing motivation, enhancing creativity, and critical thinking among university students. It also explored differences in students ’ performance and attitudes due to gender, and some writing practices. The sample consisted of 120 male and female students from four sections of an undergraduate writing course. A 19-item questionnaire was distributed and the items were structured according to three dimensions: improving learning, motivation and self confidence, and value and convenience. The results of the study indicated the positive effects of the use of reflective journal writing in enhancing motivation and self-confidence and improving learning in general and the writing skills in particular. The results also indicated that female students favored reflective journal writing more than male students. Furthermore, students who voluntarily wrote their own * "It is generally believed that the thinking process involves two aspects: reflective thinking and critical thinking. They are not separate processes; rather, they are closely connected ” (Brookfield 1987). 998 ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـ "Reflective Journal Writing as an ……&quot