A study examined the interaction strategies of one teacher for promoting student writing in the dialogue journals of 12 limited-English-proficient sixth grade students and the effect of these strategies on the length and complexity of the students' writing. The teacher strategies identified include requests for a reply and personal contributions made in teacher comments. It was found that this teacher's approach is to respond to topics introduced by the students rather than to introduce topics, and to contribute to the dialogue by making statements and expressing opinions rather than eliciting student writing with questions. This technique results in a collaborative writing effort, with teacher and students mutually developing topics of interest to them and with the students writing far more than the minimum required. (Author/MSE)