The Assessment Issue of "English in Australia" has prompted Brenton Doecke to ask himself about significant moments in the history of subject English in Australia when truly innovative work was done in the area of assessing English. There are many examples to choose from, including Brian Johnston's "Assessing English: Helping…

As demand for English-medium higher education continues to grow internationally and participation in higher education increases, the need for a better understanding of academic writing is pressing. Prior university wide taxonomies of student writing have relied on intuition, the opinions of faculty, or data from course documentation and task…

This paper presents research exploring "writing and text construction" practices in contemporary primary classrooms. In particular, the ways 17 teachers and their students engaged with technologies in the construction of classroom texts were investigated. The case studies presented prompt the necessity to extend more traditional…

This study compares the relative effectiveness of reading and writing sentences for the incidental acquisition of new vocabulary in a second language. It also examines if recall varies according to the concreteness of target words. Participants were 203 French-speaking intermediate and advanced English as second language (ESL) learners, tested for…

This article presents the findings of a study that investigated (1) the extent to which written corrective feedback (CF) can help advanced L2 learners, who already demonstrate a high level of accuracy in two functional uses of the English article system (the use of "a" for first mention and "the" for subsequent or anaphoric mentions), further…

High-stakes writing assessments currently exert a strong influence on the writing curriculum and instruction in schools across the United States. Under these circumstances it is important to examine the construct of writing competence on which these assessments are based, as well as the extent to which this construct supports the goals of…

While the noticing function of output has been increasingly researched by a number of applied linguists, the nature of such noticing and its effect on subsequent learning in the context of EFL writing have not been fully investigated. In a four-stage writing task consisting of output, comparison, and two revisions, this study examined what…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of multicultural music instruction on classroom learning outcomes. Fifth-grade children (10-11 years of age; N = 170) from four schools were randomly assigned to one of two instructional treatments: music concept and sociocultural context. The former approach used formal elements of music as a…

Three studies evaluated Tier 1 early intervention for handwriting at a critical period for literacy development in first grade and one study evaluated Tier 2 early intervention in the critical period between third and fourth grades for composing on high stakes tests. The results contribute to knowledge of research-supported handwriting and…