Bonny Norton
Department of Language Education
University of British Columbia

In this chapter I describe and analyze my use of journals in a recent research
project ( Peirce, 1993, 1995) in which I sought to investigate the language
learning experiences of adult immigrants in Canada. My study invited
participants to reflect on their language learning experiences, not only in
the classroom, but also in the home, the workplace, and the community. An
important emphasis of the study was on how participants responded to
social interaction with anglophone Canadians. In this chapter I first give
the background to the study, comparing it to other journal studies in the
field of second language acquisition (SLA). Second, I give a detailed
description of the methodology I used and how it influenced the progress
of the study. Third, I provide an analysis of the study in which I address
the progress, outcomes, and limitations of the study. Finally, I examine the
implications of the study for classroom teaching.

In the field of SLA research, a number of researchers have made use of
journals to explore the process of language learning. One such type of
study is introspective accounts of the learning of a foreign language (see,

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