This article examines the usefulness of engaging culturally relevant texts with five levels of analysis to foster critical thinking and academic writing. Teachers who are not critical of seemingly a theoretical, ahistorical reading methods often overlook the ways that cultural biases in instructional methods ignore the cultural and critical needs…

This study examined a pilot participatory needs assessment that was conducted with nine senior high school students from Port of Spain, Trinidad. Photovoice was used to engage these students in critical dialogue about their perceptions of issues affecting their health. Trained graduate students facilitated a 3-day training session in photovoice…

This study examines the stability of the "SAT Reasoning Test"™ score scales from 2005 to 2010. A 2005 old form (OF) was administered along with a 2010 new form (NF). A new conversion for OF was derived through direct equipercentile equating. A comparison of the newly derived and the original OF conversions showed that Critical Reading…

Explicitly and systematically teaching strategies for planning and drafting specific types of text has improved the writing of elementary and middle school students with disabilities in previous studies. In this investigation, we examined the effect of teaching a planning and drafting strategy for persuasive writing to high school students with…

Everyone is appalled at reports of rampant cheating among high school and college students, primarily by cutting and pasting from the Internet without providing citations. There are situations in real life where an individual suffered serious consequences for plagiarizing work. Many schools incorporate such scenarios in character education…

The aim of this thesis is to investigate and present the status of student synthesis with color coded formula writing for grade level six through twelve, and to make recommendations for educators to teach writing structure through a color coded formula system in order to increase classroom engagement and lower students' affect. The thesis first…

Building on previous studies of cross-linguistic influence (CLI) on SLA, and principled criteria for confirming its existence in L2 data, an empirical study was run on 74 Arab learners of English (ALEs). A detailed analysis was made of interlanguage stages of the simple past tense forms in 222 written texts produced by ALEs in the classroom…

This study is an attempt to compare the effect of four reading conditions on incidental vocabulary learning and recall of intermediate EFL learners. A sample population of 120 Iranian intermediate students read two short passages in one of four reading conditions: 1) L1 Marginal Glosses (MG1--provision of L1 translations of unknown words), 2) L2…

For many secondary students, writing effectively is the most elusive of the critical literacy skills needed for college and career readiness. And for many teachers, revision is the most difficult part of the writing process to tackle. How can adolescent writers be guided to revisit their work, to identify the weaknesses in their writing drafts,…

In this study, a corpus of essays stratified by level (9th grade, 11th grade, and college freshman) are analyzed computationally to discriminate differences between the linguistic features produced in essays by adolescents and young adults. The automated tool Coh-Metrix is used to examine to what degree essays written at various grade levels can…

2011 marks the Centennial of the National Council of Teachers of English, and to commemorate this milestone, CCC will publish two Symposia, one in this issue of the journal, and a second in June. Here we learn from Erika Lindemann about the founding of both NCTE and CCCC; about how both groups have developed; and, drawing from these histories,…

In this article, I consider the literacy practices that emerged in an in-school elective course centered in the literacy tradition of African American women. Drawing from spatial perspectives (Leander& Sheehy, 2004), I explore what it means to consider this course an "Other space" (Foucault,1986), as a space created without the constraints of a…

As presented by Lee and Majors (2003), "The use of call and response is a familiar structure [within communities of color] for sustaining talk, for communicating perspective, and for marking engagement" (p. 64). In this paper we delineate the need for a call-and-response pedagogy in engaging students of color in a responsive, critically…

Improving university students' writing skills is always a challenge. In a third-year French composition course, the researchers introduced the use of public Internet discussion forums to see if that would help achieve the argumentative writing skills goals that were set for this study. The results show that participation in the forums had a…

This study examines how students in Finland (16-18 years of age) constructed meaning and knowledge in a collaborative online reading situation. Student pairs (n = 19) were asked to write a joint essay on a controversial issue. First, the pairs discussed the topic freely to activate their prior knowledge. Next, they gathered source material on the…