Over the past two decades, reflective writing has occupied an increasingly prominent position in composition theory, pedagogy, and assessment as researchers have described the value of reflection and reflective writing in college students' development of higher-order writing skills, such as genre conventions (Yancey, "Reflection";…

This exploratory study reports on characteristics of proof production and proof writing observed in the work of first-year university students who took part in workshops on the theorem prover LEAN (https://leanprover.github.io). These workshops were voluntary and offered alongside a transition to proof module in a UK university. Through…

In this article, we compare holistic, analytic and cross-linguistic measures of assessment in writing considering the whole linguistic repertoire of multilingual writers. We explore different ways to look at their three languages by focusing on the relationships between these languages rather than looking at each language in isolation. We analyse…

How an author communicates with a reader is a central consideration in the critical examination of any text. When considering the communication of ideas from young people whose voices are seldom heard, the journey from author to audience has particular significance. The construction of children and young people as 'authors' is important,…

This study used wrap-up effects on eye movements to assess the relationship between online reading behavior and comprehension. Participants, assessed on measures of reading, vocabulary, and spelling, read short passages that manipulated whether a syntactic boundary was "unmarked" by punctuation, "weakly marked" by a comma, or…

We examined the relationship between two metalinguistic tasks: prosodic awareness and punctuation ability. Specifically, we investigated whether adults' ability to punctuate was related to the degree to which they are aware of and able to manipulate prosody in spoken language. English-speaking adult readers (n = 115) were administered a receptive…

This study investigates the extent to which microfeatures -- such as basic text features, readability, cohesion, and lexical diversity based on specific word lists -- affect Chinese EFL writing quality. Data analysis was conducted using natural language processing, correlation analysis and stepwise multiple regression analysis on a corpus of 268…

Phonological and morphological awareness and its correlation with reading punctuated and non-punctuated words in Arabic as a first language were examined, as well as its transfer to Hebrew as a second language. Research participants were 30 fourth grade pupils. Phonological awareness was examined by phonological decoding of actual and meaningless…

The goal of the research was to examine executive functioning and figurative language comprehension among students with learning disabilities as compared to students without learning disabilities. As part of the research, we examined 20 students with learning disabilities and 21 students with no learning disabilities, both groups of students…

Whilst historically there has been a widespread consensus that teaching grammar has no impact on students' attainment in writing, more recent research suggests that where a functionally oriented approach to grammar is meaningfully embedded within the teaching of writing, significant improvements in writing can be secured. A recent study, using a…

It was hypothesized that prosodic reading facilitates beginning readers' comprehension by allowing them to segment the text into meaningful word groups. Two prosodic features of the oral reading of second-grade students were considered: lack of inappropriate pauses and attention to punctuation. To examine the unique contribution of these features…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper was to investigate the influences of calendar year, year level, gender and language background other than English (LBOTE) on student achievement in literacy and numeracy relative to class size. Design/methodology/approach: Data for this study were collected over five years (2008-2012) as test results from the…

Purpose: The present study examines the impact of typical aging and Parkinson's disease (PD) on the relationship among breath pausing, syntax, and punctuation. Method: Thirty young adults, 25 typically aging older adults, and 15 individuals with PD participated. Fifteen participants were age- and sex-matched to the individuals with PD.…

In this study, the purpose was to determine whether there was concordance among raters in the assessment of the writing performance using analytic rubric; furthermore, factors affecting the assessment process were examined. The analytic rubric used in the study consists of three sections and ten properties: External structure (format, spelling and…