Self-evaluations of the stream of thought in

journal writing
James L. Myers*
Applied English Department, Ming Chuan University, Taoyuan, Taiwan
Received 1 March 2001; accepted 8 August 2001
Abstract
William James theoretical model of consciousness known as the stream of thought has
been applied in this study as an impetus for English as a foreign language learners self-
reections on the purpose of journal writing. They evaluated their thought processes by fol-
lowing a guided questionnaire designed to elicit thought patterns based on James concept.
After having written their journals over a 3-month period, students were able to trace their
strengths and weaknesses and describe their own learning patterns and needs in regard to
learning how to write in English for both personal expression and academic writing. Through
an analysis of their reections, certain general patterns emerged in relation to vocabulary
acquisition, organizational strategies, invention, personal expression, and thought. These
patterns are described as well as examples of individual variation regarding students con-
scious awareness of their writing processes. # 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Student journals; Consciousness; Meta-cognitive learning; Academic writing; Psychology and
language learning
1. Introduction
This paper applies aspects of Jamess (1950/1890) famous theory of the stream of
thought, to journal writing. It takes a case study approach to delineate individual
dierences by focusing on 15 students writing processes. By using James model of
consciousness as a heuristic for Taiwanese students self-ruminations while writing
System 29 (2001) 481488
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PI I : S0346- 251X( 01) 00037- 9
* Present address: 1, 6th oor, Alley 7, Lane 50, Chien Kuo Road, Pateh Hsih, Taoyaun Hsien, Tai-
wan, ROC. Fax: +886-3-3651583.
E-mail address: [email protected] (J.L. Myers).
their journals, I hoped to discover to what degree self-reection about their journal
writing also inuenced their writing for academic purposes. My interest in this was
partially motivated by a study by Leki and Carson (1994). Undergraduates reported
that English for Academic Purposes (EAP) courses do not prepare them well for
writing in other disciplines besides English. A popular activity in such courses is
journal writing. Hence, Leki and Carson question its appropriateness in preparing
students to write in EAP courses (p. 96). However, this paper contends, as EAP
writing courses cannot meet every students needs, journal writing can be an eective
method for them to independently discover and develop their individual academic
interests and their EAP writing capacities. Thus, this study applies a theoretical
model of consciousness in order to see to if it can be practically benecial in
improving EFL students journal writing and also examines the academic value of
journal writing itself in EFL composition classes.
Prior to being capable of academic writing, EFL students must also be able to
develop such skills as invention and organization. I wondered if journal writing
could aid students in acquiring these abilities. What patterns might emerge from
their self-reections in terms of reoccurring images and topics that demonstrated an
enhancement and increased awareness of logical organization and inventiveness in
essay writing?
Journals or diaries can be used as introspective tools, but as Bailey has contended
(1990, p. 224), to acquire maximum benets, writers should re-read the entries and
attempt to locate the patterns in their writing. Moreover, as Halbach (2000) con-
cludes in a case study of learning strategies in diary writing, weaker students lack the
strategies of self-evaluation while more successful students are able to make full use
of a wide range of resources and re-enforce their learning with follow-up activities
(2000, p. 93). Therefore, I wondered to what extent re-reading journals helped indi-
vidual students, especially weaker ones, to clarify and realize their language learning
objectives.
2. Writing, self-reection, and the stream of thought
Even though James wrote Chapter IX The Stream of Thought in his Principles
of Psychology in the nineteenth century, many modern researchers probing into the
nature of consciousness such as Baars (1997), Natsoulas (1997) and Singer (1998)
view it as one of the most signicant and inuential models of consciousness. As
Singer (1975, p. 32) points out, much great literature has been established on interior
monologues taken from streams of thoughts. Twentieth century writers such as
Proust, Kerouac, and Joyce come readily to mind.
James described the stream of thought as having ve characteristics: (1) every
thought is a part of an individuals consciousness; (2) each thought is always
changing; (3) each is sensibly continuous; (4) every thought is directed toward
objects outside itself; (5) and thought discriminates among those objects, including
some while rejecting others (James, p. 225). James also sees the stream of thought as
developmental in that a baby does not have one and even lacks a pure principle of
482 J.L. Myers / System 29 (2001) 481488
subjectivity. . .(but certainly needs a stream of thought) to make him sensible at all to
anything, to make him discriminate. (James, 1950/1890, p. 321). Of course, the
stream of thought is a metaphor of consciousness which not everyone may agree
with, but James uses such a metaphor to emphasize that thought processes happen
so rapidly that by the time one can report them they have disappeared. Most likely,
everyone can agree that describing ones experiences completely in words is virtually
impossible. Thus, introspection must also involve retrospection to truly capture the
most signicant aspects of ones own experiences. In journal writing, a re-reading of
their journals may provide most students, who take such an activity seriously, with
both a retrospective and introspective perspective on their writing.
As Vygotsky (1999/1934) contends, thought and speech are the essence of human
consciousness and writing is speech in thought and image (p. 181). If this is the case,
it appears then that writing can be a means by which a person can understand and
rene her personal language development, especially by studying her own writing
and seeing within it a reection of her attitude toward learning and experience as
seen in her recorded thoughts at dierent periods of time.
3. Method
3.1. The population and setting
In this study, 15 Mandarin-speaking Taiwanese students were randomly selected
from two second-year university composition classes for Applied English majors at
Ming Chuan University in Taiwan. The classes had a total of 68 students. Most
of the students lived o-campus, near the university. Their ages ranged from 19 to
25 years. Three of the 15 students were males and 12 were females. These ratios
reected the preponderance of females at Ming Chuan and in the Applied English
Department. Their English ability was at an intermediate level; the writing class was
a required subject for their major and was intended to teach them practical and
academic writing skills. The department oered specialized Applied English courses
in three career tracks: teaching, business, and tourism.
3.2. Procedures
The students had the assignment of writing journals for 3 months, three times
per week. Although not every student in the class managed to faithfully write
three entries per week, the 15 random selections in this study fell into a range of 30
34 entries over the 3-month period. I told the class that their grade would be based
on quantity, coherence, and interesting content rather than on grammar. They had
the option of choosing from a list of 50 topics which allowed them to practise such
invention skills as comparison and contrast and persuasion or to indulge in guided
fantasies. They also had the option of writing about anything that they wished to
write about. They exchanged journals once during the semester with a student of
their choice in order to increase the communicative aspect of the activity and to
J.L. Myers / System 29 (2001) 481488 483
expand their audience to not just themselves and the instructor but to other students
as well. This aspect of the study was inuenced by Cole, Raer, Rogan, and
Schleicher (1998) and Huangs (2000) research into journal exchanges. Two weeks
prior to the nal collection of their journals I gave them a set of self-evaluation
questions based on James stream of thought, which they were to respond to in their
journals as three entries.
A month later, after I had collected, graded and returned their journals I asked
them to nd a partner and interview each other about their self-evaluations and then
re-write them in class. Thus, they had two opportunities to write their reections
about their stream of thought in their writing.
3.3. The guided self-evaluation questionnaire and its underlying rationale
The rst entry consisted of two sets of questions. The rst set asked: Since you
began writing your journal, how have you changed as a writer? Have you personally
changed in any way in the past few months as seen in your writing? If so, how? As
James observes, our thoughts continue to change along with our life experiences and
as Heraclitus long ago noted, we never step down into the same stream twice (James,
1950/1890, p. 233). Thus, I wanted to see to what extent students looked back at
their experiences and their writing in a fresh light. The second set of questions asked:
As you re-read your journal, do you see any topics or images that re-occur? What are
they? Why do you think they re-occur? In asking about topics that reoccur I was
considering the process of invention. As James notes, as we voluntarily engage in
thinking, our thoughts sometimes revolve around a particular topic and sometimes
it involves some unresolved problem. Images may arise that relate to solving the
problem (James, 1950/1890, p. 259).
The second entry also asked two sets of questions. The rst set included: As you
have been writing have you had a purpose or have you been writing whatever you feel?
If you had a purpose, what was it? James sees the stream of thought as made up
sometimes of strands of imagery which wander around such as in reverie or day-
dreaming, but most of the time our ideas are guided by a purpose which we always
return to even if our thoughts may occasionally drift away onto other trajectories. I
wondered if the students were able to see their own goals more clearly through such
meta-cognitive questioning. The second set of questions asked: Do you have any
words or sentences that you often repeat in your writing? Why do you repeat them do
you think? I asked these questions to see how students used repetition in their writ-
ing. Repetition can be used to establish rhythm or for emphasis; on the other hand,
it might be used because of a lack of sucient vocabulary. James observed that
rhythms are an important ingredient in our consciousness and are characterized by
such repeated phenomena as breathing, pulse, heart-beats, and word or sentence
fragments that pass by in our imaginations (James, 1950/1890, p. 620). By noting
reoccurring words I might be able to discover what the students were thinking about
most when they were writing.
The third entry also asked two sets of questions. The rst set of questions asked:
Do you think the content of your journal has a lot of variety? Why or why not? I asked
484 J.L. Myers / System 29 (2001) 481488
these questions on the premise that an interesting journal should describe a variety
of events or topics. Also, by asking themselves these questions students could
evaluate to what extent they were actually observing their own experiences or
environment or developing ideas and attempting to depict them in their journals. As
James says, many objects, events, changes, many subdivisions, immediately widen
the view as we look back. Emptiness, monotony, familiarity make it shrivel up.
(James, 1950/1890, p. 624).
The nal question was: What do you think you can learn from writing a journal?
From this, I hoped the students might provide an overall assessment of themselves
or reveal some new aspect to the process.
3.4. A discussion of the responses to the questionnaire
The students responses indicate a great deal of individual variation in their writ-
ing processes. I have identied each student by a letter A through O and analyzed
the self-monitoring of each ones (1) language use, (2) rhetorical organization (3)
invention; (4) the role of their thoughts and (5) emotions in regard to their experi-
ences as writers and learners by seeking statements that reected these items in their
self-evaluations. I derived these ve points inductively by means of an analysis of the
patterns, which emerged from the students replies. I was also informed by informal
interviews that I held with several students. Moreover, as the students exchanged
journals with each other once during the semester and wrote down their reactions to
each others journals, I have also interpreted these responses in regard to the ve
categories above.
In terms of language use, the most outstanding concern was with vocabulary.
Eight of the 15 students in this study directly expressed or suggested that a lack of
vocabulary was a problem while writing. Six of these eight stated that they simply
repeated the same words over and over because of this lack of vocabulary. In terms
of individual variation, student C reported that she strove for variety and deleted
entries where she was being redundant. Student F stated that in certain cases she
repeated certain words for emphasis and not because they were redundant, but in
other cases it was because of a vocabulary deciency. Student B stated that she had
had no vocabulary improvement and her English vocabulary had been deteriorating
since she had entered the university and she only wrote supercially about topics.
Two of these eight students also mentioned that journal writing was a good way to
improve their vocabulary, as did an additional two students who otherwise did not
state that a lack of vocabulary was a problem. Additionally, in terms of language
use, two students showed a concern for grammar and wanted more feedback about
their grammar errors. Thus, vocabulary and to a lesser extent grammar, were their
two main concerns about language use.
In terms of organizational strategies, 11 students stated or suggested that journal
writing was a way of improving their organizational skills in general.
Eight students discussed invention strategies which also seemed to contain pos-
sibilities toward enhancing their academic writing. Student I, for example, used
mind-maps before she wrote about a topic in her journal and felt that she had
J.L. Myers / System 29 (2001) 481488 485
improved her organizational skills and generated ideas with this strategy. Student L
imagined herself as a popular writer who interacted with her readers and that they
gave her suggestions as to what to write about; student N took a problem solving
attitude toward dierent topics; she also found it fascinating to look up infor-
mation that could support her viewpoint; students G and K also found that journal
writings provided the impetus to research and read about various topics before
writing; student O drew from her past childhood experiences to write her journal;
student E compared the dierence between free-writing and structured writing and
preferred structured writing such as writing a topic sentence, supporting sentences,
and a conclusion which he thought was easier than free-writing. Student E also
observed that journal writing helped his observational skills and he felt that this led
him to have more ideas. Several more students felt that they noticed things more
than before; such as student H, and the above mentioned L and K.
Thirteen students directly referred to how journal writing inuenced their
thoughts or cognitive skills. For example, both students H and K stated that not
only had they become more observant but also wrote in more detail than before.
Students H, F, and G, stated that they often repeated the words, I think. Student
H wrote that she repeated these words because she had a purpose behind her writ-
ing: to collect her thoughts. Student F wrote that she repeated I think along with
so and added that she had become more independent in her thinking. Student G
emphasized that the journal made her realize the importance of thinking and she
strove for variety and tried to avoid cliche s. Student I repeated although and
she thought she did this because everything has two sides. Student J wrote that she
had begun to think more before she wrote and did this to avoid making mistakes.
Student L stated somewhat paradoxically that her sensitivity to the environment had
increased, but at that the same time she was unable to really see any change in her
writing because she just wrote about her thoughts. Also in relation to the cognitive
aspects of journal writing, Students A and E saw their journals as aids for memory.
Moreover, Student B wrote how sometimes something that happened led her to
connect things and she wrote it down. Almost all of the students stressed that
thinking was an important aspect of their writing processes. Journal writing was an
impetus for thinking about themselves, their learning processes, current events, their
interests, social life, and environment.
Ten students discussed matters of an emotional or aective nature which emerged
in their journals. Often they were reoccurring topics which dealt with their social life,
family, or childhood. Student O, for example, noted that she wrote frequently about
her feelings concerning these three aspects of her life. She also personally felt that she
had become a more energetic person during the 3-month period of her life while
she was writing the journal. Student O also wrote about her childhood and her
relationships with others. Student A expressed her feelings and moods and said she
loved doing this. Student E wrote frequently about the news and music which were
his interests. Student G wrote about her mothers laugh, country trees and owers.
Not all factors were positive, student L wrote that she lacked self-condence, and
this is where she recognized that she needed to make improvements. These are a few
examples of aective factors the students saw in their writing.
486 J.L. Myers / System 29 (2001) 481488
After performing this analysis, I asked another experienced EFL teacher to
evaluate the 15 students. I did not tell her the nature of my research questions, but
requested that she try to nd ve patterns in the writings. Her categories did not
completely match mine, but what she provided conrmed most of my observations.
Three patterns corresponded almost identically with mine; that is, the components
that dealt with emotions, thoughts, and organization. With regard to these cat-
egories, she saw that some students preferred to develop topics rather that write
emotionally whereas other preferred to be more personally expressive. The two
other patterns she observed were that the responses contained students reections
of past experience and this especially provided an aid to memory; and they self-
evaluated their own learning strategies to determine their learning needs. She saw
four types of writers emerging from the journals: historical; rational; metacognitive;
and emotional. Some writers possessed a combination of these characteristics and
others were purely of one type.
3.5. Journal exchange
In addition, six of the 15 students in this study commented on the journal
exchange and had positive comments about its value. For example, one commented
that she learned from the other students mistakes; another said she learned to
improve her study habits and to seek out ideas from various sources as her exchange
partner had done; another student analyzed the other students journal for simi-
larities and contrasts with her writing; yet another student appreciated the encour-
agement which she received from her exchange partner.
4. Conclusion
These results suggest that students reections induced by a Jamesian model of the
stream of thought, involved students in an increased self-monitoring of their
writing skills which led them to increased insights into their strengths and weak-
nesses as writers. Several patterns emerged. Many of the students became especially
aware of their vocabulary deciencies and the need to strengthen their vocabulary
through increased reading and writing. Journal writing also provided opportunities
for the development of their own individual invention strategies, and several stu-
dents saw factual knowledge as the basis and jumping o point to further creativ-
ity and discovery. This suggests that journal writing contributes to academic writing
and can be used for discovery, research, and data collection directed toward future
essay writing in which students develop and rene essays around topics that interest
them which they have already initially explored in their journals. Moreover, in the
aective realm, many students felt comfortable expressing their feelings in the non-
threatening way which journal writing provided.
Signicantly, for most students, a reoccurring theme that they recognized in their
writing involved thinking itself. Many of them saw themselves as improved thinkers
and saw a connection between thinking and writing. Perhaps Vygotsky made an apt
J.L. Myers / System 29 (2001) 481488 487
point when he wrote, Experience teaches us that thought does not express itself in
words, but realizes itself in them (Vygotsky, 1999/1934, p. 251).
Self-knowledge through journal writing can be accomplished by allowing students
to structure and write their journals in their individual ways, thus fostering creativity
rst, and teachers might suggest revision through self-questioning and re-reading of
their journals later as done in this study, so that learners can fully appreciate the
advances they have made and the deciencies they still need to correct. Also, this
process allows the students a greater measure of autonomy as they learn to make
their own connections to research and personal experience.
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