"Professional Learning Community: Emergent Literacy" was developed to support preschool teachers through collaborative learning experiences in a literacy professional learning community (PLC). PLCs are a form of professional development in which small groups of educators with shared interests work together with the goals of expanding…

Changes to the pedagogy of foreign languages (FL) have taken place with the integration of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). These changes provide instructors with opportunities to become meaning facilitators and designers. This article presents the rationale behind the pedagogy for a university course to enhance FL for academic…

Since its advent word processing has become a common writing tool, providing potential advantages over writing by hand. Word processors permit easy revision, produce legible characters quickly, and may provide additional supports (e.g., spellcheckers, speech recognition). Such advantages should remedy common difficulties among weaker…

This article describes an investigation into the practice-based doctorate in the visual and performing arts, a genre that is still in the process of development. A key feature of these doctorates is that they comprise two components: a visual or performance component, and a written text which accompanies it which in some ways is similar to, but in…

The educational use of computer-based feedback in the classroom is becoming widespread. However, less is known about (1) the extent to which tools influence how instructors provide written and oral comments, and (2) whether receiving oral or written feedback influences the nature of learners' revisions. This case study, which expands existing…

The Common Core set a standard for all children to read increasingly complex texts throughout schooling. The purpose of the present study was to explore text characteristics specifically in relation to early-grades text complexity. Three hundred fifty primary-grades texts were selected and digitized. Twenty-two text characteristics were identified…

The previous studies on abstracts (e.g., Santos, 1996; Samraj, 2002; Pho, 2008) illustrate that disciplinary variation in research article abstracts is discernible. However, the studies of abstracts from two related disciplines are still limited. The present study aimed to explore the rhetorical moves of abstracts in the fields of linguistics and…

In this study, we examine the effect of background knowledge and local cohesion on learning from texts. The study is based on construction-integration model. Participants were 176 undergraduate students who read a Computer Science text. Half of the participants read a text of maximum local cohesion and the other a text of minimum local cohesion.…

Teaching children in the primary grades the text structures and features used by authors of information text has been shown to improve comprehension of information texts and provide the scaffolding and support these children need in order to write their own information texts. As teachers implement the "English Language Arts Common Core State…

To have a clearer idea of the problems students with dyslexia may face during their studies, we compared writings of 100 students with dyslexia and 100 age matched control students in higher education. The aim of this study was to compare the writing of young adults with dyslexia and young adults without dyslexia. The study was carried out in…

This dissertation presents a new tool for exploratory text analysis that attempts to improve the experience of navigating and exploring text and its metadata. The design of the tool was motivated by the unmet need for text analysis tools in the humanities and social sciences. In these fields, it is common for scholars to have hundreds or thousands…

Although there is a rich literature on the role of text genre and structure on students' literal comprehension, more research is needed regarding the role of these text features on students' high-level comprehension as evidenced in their small-group discussions. As such, the present study examined the effects of text genre (i.e., narrative and…

While there are a number of important critical pedagogies being proposed in the field of foreign language study, more attention should be given to providing concrete examples of how to apply these ideas in the classroom. This article offers a new approach to the textual analysis of literary classics through the keyword-based methodology originally…

This study explored patterns in L2 writing development by focusing on one of the linguistic features of texts (fluency) from a complex dynamic systems perspective. It investigated whether two English-as-a-foreign-language university students would experience discontinuous change (phase transition) in their writing fluency through repetition of a…

Content is related to other aspects of writing, but exactly how they are related has remained unclear or has not received sufficient critical attention. Consequently, in most writing assessments, content has been treated as just one among several relatively distinct but equal elements. However, in this study, the authors have quantified these…