In her article, Icy Lee (2019, pp. 524-536) discusses the differences between comprehensive written corrective feedback (CWCF) and focused written corrective feedback (FWCF). She argues that teachers should concentrate more on focused feedback, and highlight and correct only a few grammar errors or issues with organisation, for example, instead of…

In this commentary, authors Frank Fear and Lorilee R. Sandmann reflect on their 2001-2002 "Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement" article "The 'New' Scholarship: Implications for Engagement and Extension" reprinted in this 20th anniversary issue of "Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement."…

Anderson's central concern in his "ELT Journal" article (Vol. 69, No. 3, 2015) is to introduce several helpful changes teachers can make to a regular lesson plan pro forma due to a particular language learning environment and unpredictable events. In introducing these changes, Anderson discusses affordance, learning objectives, and…

In this rejoinder, the authors describe the aim of the original study as an effort to conduct a critical test of an important postulate underlying the Cross-Battery Assessment PSW approach (XBA PSW; Kranzler, Floyd, Benson, Zaboski, & Thibodaux, this issue). The authors used classification agreement analysis to examine the concordance between…

Michael Rosenak uses the twin metaphors of "language" and "literature," borrowed from Oakeshott and Peters, to argue that the goal of education is initiation into a language. This goal transcends the study of literature in that language. It includes, as well, the development of the capacity both to critique literature and to…

The University of Arkansas Center for Education Reform's report on charter school funding inequities proclaims large and growing inequities between school district and charter school revenues, even after accounting for differences in student needs. But the report displays complete lack of understanding of intergovernmental fiscal relationships,…

Noles and Gelman (2012) attempt to critically reevaluate the claim that linguistic labels affect children's judgments of visual similarity. They report results of an experiment that used a modified version of Sloutsky and Fisher's (2004) task and conclude that "labels do not generally affect children's perceptual similarity judgments; rather,…

A new report by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), "Differences by Design?," compares differences in approaches and demographics between and among charter school models and local "traditional public schools." Using three national data sets, the report effectively captures the national universe of charter schools. It…

Goo and Mackey (this issue) outline several apparent design flaws in studies that have compared the impact of different types of corrective feedback (CF). Furthermore, they argue that SLA researchers should stop comparing recasts to other types of CF because they are inherently different kinds of phenomena. Our response to their article addresses…

Humphry (this issue) deserves credit for drawing attention to the long-neglected fact that differences in item discrimination parameters are often due to empirical factors and not the product of random error components. In doing so, Humphry offers a psychometrically elegant, coherent, and practically important new model that is more flexible while…

Behavioral scientists have struggled with units of measurement for as long as they have struggled with measurement itself. Psychology's sole attempt at an explicit unit of measurement--the Lexile Framework for Reading (Stenner, Burdick, Sanford, & Burdick, 2006)--has been and continues to be ignored by the psychometric "cognoscenti."…

This article presents Stephen Humphry's response to the commentaries for his article "The Role of the Unit in Physics and Psychometrics." The commentaries covered a range of important considerations and implications. Given that the author fully agrees with the majority of the content, attention will be confined mainly to points that call…

Jory Brass and Leslie David Burns provide a useful and informative review of research appearing in the "English Journal" ("EJ") and "Research in the Teaching of English" ("RTE") over the past 100 years. It is a bit unfortunate, if understandable, to exclude books and articles in other journals, because such a restriction excludes many pieces of…

This paper presents a critical analysis of two recent studies on error correction, Ellis, Sheen, Murakami, and Takashima (2008) and Bitchener (2008) and argues that neither study constitutes evidence for error correction based on discussion of the comparability of participants, design issues, and analysis flaws in both studies. The paper further…

Tooley, Dixon and Gomathi maintain that private unrecognised unaided schools in Hyderabad, India, catering for children of the poor, provide a better level of education than do their government counterparts. We examine this contention and argue first that Tooley et al.'s conceptualisation of education and its benefits is flawed and second that the…