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The thesis of this volume is that writing done by students who control their own topics, who have genuine purposes for writing, and have a real, known audience, is quite different and valuable in its own right. It forms a rich source of information about how young students think, manage their social interactions, and use language with competence to get things done. By selecting dialogue journal writing as a corpus for analysis, it is possible to observe children's communicative competence in using written language purposefully, apart from their ability to master a particular form of writing. The central argument is that dialogue journal communication represents a kind of personal literacy, prior to and more comprehensive than the particular literacies emphasized and assessed in schools. The contents include a practitioner's view of the practice itself and a summary of the research study methods developed to analyze interactive written conversations.