Abstract
Journal writing can help learners to formulate new opinions and perspectives and give them a venue to explore, think, and practice skills learned in class. Against this background, the present study examined themes and sentiments in students’ reflective journals. For this aim, thirty-two students who enrolled in an audio-visual translation class were required to keep a weekly reflective journal for 10 weeks. After completing the 10-week journal writing, they were asked to write one reaction entry on reflective journal writing including their thoughts about the class. Students’ final reaction journal entries were analyzed qualitatively using NVIVO 12 and a sentiment analysis approach. Results showed that the most iterative themes emerged from the journals were group presentation, reaction to class, reflective journal writing, learning how to condense texts, and in-class discussion, followed by aftermath of class, difficulties in translation and translation process, showing both positive and negative responses respectively. In addition, the result of sentiment analysis revealed that students tended to hold a positive attitude towards the class. Upon closer examination of student emotions in the reflective journals and class, emotions such as happiness, sadness and fear were more prominent than those of anger, disgust and surprise. These findings provide a meaningful foundation for evaluation and revision of a course syllabus.
Figures & Tables
Fig. 1. An analysis of one journal entry with NVIVO 12
