Russell Stannard makes a date with a diary.
Some of you may already have heard about the open diary. This is a website where you can write a diary which the rest of the world can access – or you can read other people’s diaries. You can also make comments on other people’s diaries, which the original author can read. If you decide to keep your own diary, you can even have the spelling checked with a spell checker! The site is completely free and people of all ages use it. You can search for an author by age, nationality, interests or in alphabetical order. Many of the diaries are written in English.
Using the diaries in class
I have been using the diaries in a class with a group of adult Chinese students. My first idea was simply to get the students to read various diaries and find out information about the authors. This took a fair amount of preparation as I had to read the entries and make sure there wasn’t too much bad language, etc in the entries. There were ten students in the class so I paired them off and gave each pair the geographical location and name of one author to read about, eg Slovakia – Babsy, Spain – Jose. The students had to go on the site, read their author’s diary entries and then discuss a set of questions given to them on a handout. To save time, I made these questions generic, but told the students that it was possible that not all the questions would be relevant. Here they are:
- Does the writer keep the diary every day?
- What friends does the writer mention?
- What does the writer do for a living?
- What type of person is the writer?
- Does the writer talk about their family?
- What do they say?
- Does the writer have any hobbies?
- What sort of things does the writer do with their free time?
- What ‘secrets’ do you think you have found out about the writer?
- Would you like to meet the writer? Why or why not?
- Is there anything you have read about, a story or comment, that you think would be interesting to tell to the class?
Finding good diary writers was very easy and some of the entries were really good. I tried to choose writers who had three or more entries, but not too many. I told the students to skim the entries and not to read them in too much detail. I warned them that they must be aware that the writer’s English was not always going to be perfect and that we were doing this activity as a fluency exercise. I also pointed out that some of the entries also had comments from other people and that these could also be quite interesting to read. Once the students had read their entries and discussed the questions, I got them to join together with another pair and simply talk about the person that they had read about. At the end we had an informal feedback session; a few of the students related some of the stories or comments they had read. The activity worked well as the students were really interested in reading about someone else’s life. However it did take a lot of preparation as I had had to ‘censor’ five diaries the day before!
Students’ diaries
I soon realised that I could also get the students to keep their own diaries. It takes very little to set up a diary. You first have to put in a small amount of information and a few opening lines about yourself, and after that you can add your entries whenever you want. This is very helpful for me. I can simply log on, look up one of my students and check whether they have written their diary or not. Alongside the opening profile is a list of all the entries the writer has made. I can also add notes in the section where readers are invited to make comments on a diary entry. I showed the students in class how to set up their own diaries. I explained the different levels of ‘access’ to the diaries there are and what the comments from other readers were. My students all have access to computers in my lesson so I got them to create their own profiles in class. I then told them that they had to make at least two entries a week.
We have only just started this activity, but I thought it might be interesting to give you the names of some of my students so that you can read their work. They all seem very excited at the moment about writing their diaries. I am now thinking of creating a ‘reader’ for each diary, ie I am going to pair them up so that they have to read each other’s diaries and add some comments each week. To read my students’ diaries, do a geographical search and look under UK. Then type any of the following names into the search section:
- Mr Bright
- Miss Angelina
- Crazy Dove
- Marygyy
Russell Stannard is a senior lecturer in ICT and course leader for MSc Multimedia at the University of Westminster, UK. He has an extensive publishing background in ELT and is currently working with BBC Worldwide on various CD-ROMs, and with Macmillan Hong Kong on a primary course. He also teaches English and Spanish at Sutton Adult Education College, UK.
This article first appeared in English Teaching Professional, Issue 44, 2006