This quantitative study endeavored to compare a new strategy of making irrelevant information less salient with a common reading strategy of highlighting to determine which would best aid students in making connections within and between multiple texts. Participants were 60 high school students, ranging in age from 14-17 years old. The adolescents…

By asking questions, students can practice many cognitive processes, and these processes may reflect clues about their thinking skills. In order to understand students' cognitive levels in thinking, questions can be used as agents. Doing so, this study focuses on examining students' questions in terms of cognitive levels of Bloom's revised…

Background: Writing is an important and complex skill, which could be enhanced by teaching students effective writing strategies such as outlining. Electronic outlining - integrated feature in Microsoft® Word -- has been shown to enhance students' writing performance. However, little is known about the optimal didactic approach for electronic…

This systematic review article summarizes the effects of explicit text structure instruction on expository text comprehension for adolescents with learning disabilities or at risk for reading failure. A thorough literature search with four databases and backward citation search identified nine studies published in the past 22 years for inclusion…

High school graduates should be able to read to complete everyday tasks. Without this ability, their quality of life could decline from the lack, a negative mindset, or both. Therefore, educational stakeholders aiding students with reading struggles must find the most effective solutions for these students. Students achieving below-average on…

This research aimed at investigating the most dominant of transitivity process used in report text and how it relates with the nature of report text. It employed descriptive qualitative design and applied Systemic Functional Linguistics on Transitivity. The data were 29 clauses taken from report texts used in ninth grade's National Exam. The…

Background: Late secondary-level students (those in their final 2 years of secondary school) preparing for the demands of university and careers increasingly face texts written in academic language. Unfortunately, few intervention studies show how instruction can improve their reading achievement. Methods: The 152 student participants (16-17 years…

The present study focused on examining how individuals make adaptations while reading non-linear graphic text by examining the role of executive functioning, as well as identifying and describing the reading processes individuals use while reading. Sixty-seven students in Grades 9 through 12 engaged in verbal reporting while reading graphic text,…

This study developed a learning system that allows teachers to edit assignments designed to teach students the text structure strategy through the use of four phases: instructing, modeling, practicing, and reflecting. A 7-week instructional experiment was conducted in which 84 12th-grade students learned the text structure strategy using this…

The present study examines the ways Chinese high school EFL learners organize information in their writing. A class of 50 students at grade 9 from a local high school in Guangzhou, China, were recruited as participants. The students' writing at grade 9 was collected as a corpus, comprising ten writing tasks from different text types. In order to…

Integration of technology which includes the use of a smartphone is currently one of the trends in ESL writing classes. Particularly in collaborative activities, it is assumed that the use of smartphones contributes to the attitude of the learners towards writing and their writing performance as well. Consequently, the present study investigated…

The purpose of the study was to investigate differences in writers' abilities to perceive global text organisation in self-, peer- and teacher/researcher-authored essays. Eight student participants were identified as proficient, middle or developing, based on the levels of paragraph subordination, the average number of T-Units and the number of…

The continuation task, a new form of reading-writing integrated task in which test-takers read an incomplete story and then write the continuation and ending of the story, has been increasingly used in writing assessment, especially in China. However, language-test developers' understanding of the effects of important task-related factors on…

Reading critically involves examining the language choices authors make to "get the job done" -- in other words, to communicate effectively in specific ways with particular audiences. Not all students in middle and high school intuit this type of reading and may experience challenges when they go to write for academic purposes. Their…

School counselors write letters of recommendation for students pursuing postsecondary education and help teachers and staff prepare for this task. Although letters of recommendation may impact admission and scholarship opportunities, research about equity and bias in letters is minimal as compared to standardized tests, teacher expectations, and…