This case study involved designing an electronic-based environment to explore the effectiveness of electronic mail (e-mail) as a writing tool for dialogue journaling. The setting for this study was an intermediate-level reading and writing class in the American English Institute Program on the campus of a large public university. Over a period of 9 weeks, six randomly chosen English-as-a-Second Language (ESL) students in the class wrote dialogue journals to their instructor using e-mail while the rest of the students in the class wrote dialogue journals to the instructor using paper and pencil. The issues investigated were: What were the students' attitudes toward dialogue journal writing via e-mail? What was the instructor's perception regarding e-mail dialogue journal writing? What problems occurred in the process of using e-mail as a tool for doing dialogue journal writing? In what ways were e-mail journals different from paper journals? The findings of the study show that a variety of factors combined to exert an influence on the participants' attitudes towards e-mail. Limited knowledge about e-mail systems prevented some students from taking a full advantage of e-mail as a unique communication tool. Comparison of e-mail journals and paper journals reveals that e-mail created a different writing style than that of paper and pencil. For example, in the journal entries, participants in the e-mail group tended to: (1) use formula functions like opening and closing greetings (none of the students in the paper group used any); (2) use more requesting functions (asking questions) than those in the paper group; and (3) produce more language functions per writing session. In addition, e-mail communication was more spontaneous than paper dialogue. (Contains 38 references.) (Author/SWC)