Background: Since its integration into the European Higher Education Area, the Spanish educational system has evolved, introducing innovations into university teaching methodologies. This new approach entails the development of capacities, competencies, and skills that enable students to develop their critical thinking. Objective: This work aims…

To challenge resistance to required literature courses, instructors quiz students regularly on the readings; they also require examinations that ask students to define key terms, to answer background questions focused on authors and dates, to identify key passages by author/title/speaker, and to explain the thematic significance of each quotation.…

I retired from teaching in August, 2018. In the fall semester of that academic year, I taught a section of Basic Writing (now called "Workshop in Composition"), one of the courses I taught in the fall of 1975, my first year at the University of Pittsburgh. This essay is a documentary account of that course, including writing assignments…

Literature circles are student-led, small-group discussions that promote active learning and engagement with literary texts. The objective of this study was to assess the impact of literature circles on student engagement and learning outcomes in a pedology course. For various reading assignments throughout the semester, students either…

English Language Arts has historically been tied to the civic purposes of schools, and this qualitative study of a social design-based project (Gutierrez & Vossoughi, 2010) examines the intersection of language and literacy learning and youth civic engagement, a problem space I call "Civics English." In this dissertation, I describe…

Faculty at Bethany College, Kansas found that when engaging with controversial topics like social justice, students needed lower-stakes spaces to think--and history and writing, together, provided these needed spaces. When taught in combination, these two subject areas prompted engagement and self-reflection, and the interdisciplinary synergy…

The aim of this study is to view how argumentative text pattern teaching influences constituting argumentative essay elements. The study was performed according to one-group pre-test post-test design. The study was carried out in spring term of 2017-2018 academic year and it lasted for five weeks. 33 prospective teachers who took the course of…

Teacher-moderated online chats are a common option for conducting writing conferences with students. The efficacy of chat sessions is impacted by the expectations for and structure of these sessions. This corpus-based study used a move analysis to determine the purposes and organization of 129 chats between 3 experienced teachers and 106 students…

Although the importance of students' argumentative peer feedback for learning is undeniable, there is a need for further empirical evidence on whether and how it is related to various aspects of argumentation-based learning namely argumentative essay writing, domain-specific learning, and attitudinal change while considering their epistemic…

As teaching moves increasingly online, language teachers are faced with the challenge of how to support dyslexic students in an inclusive manner in and out of the classroom. This paper will focus on an innovative educational multi-modal, mobile application -- Comics for Inclusive English Language Learning (CIELL) -- supporting upper-intermediate…

High school English classrooms are in need of critical literacy. This study examines the current research related to English classroom pedagogy and applies some pedagogical techniques along with critical literacy tools recommended in order to improve students' critical literacy. I am a practicing high school English teacher. I used Improvement…

Political theory lags behind other subfields in political science in rigorously testing what helps foster critical thinking (CT). Yet some of the greatest temptations to engage in motivated reasoning can be found in normative political contexts. This study uses multiple regression analysis to explore nine semesters of data from an introductory…

Yekaterina McKenney offers a plea to writing teachers: Don't emphasize the conventions of writing, the regurgitation of facts, and correct spelling and grammar over the generation of ideas and the creativity of storytelling. She offers up fresh ideas and suggestions about how to make writing meaningful and personal for student writers--from…

Many international students in American universities are required to take writing courses in English as a second language (ESL) before participating in a mainstream first-year composition (FYC) course. Given that the goal of ESL writing course is to prepare students for FYC course, the connection between ESL and FYC courses is significant. This…

Utility-value (UV) interventions, in which students complete writing assignments about the personal usefulness of course material, show great promise for promoting interest and performance in introductory college science courses, as well as persistence in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields. As researchers move toward scaling…