Metacognition or "B.S."? Examining Student Reading Practices in Reading Journals

Recent reading scholarship suggests that instructors should carefully attend to their students' reading practices. Although reading journals offer insight into student practices, we continue to treat reading journals as a mundane, process-based document and overlook the important metacognitive work that journals contribute. Through the examination of a corpus of student texts, this article argues for reenvisioning the work of the reading journal, demonstrating how this commonplace assignment contributes to students' recognition of reading-writing connections and describes a new lens through which to approach reading journals.