Cohesive devices have long been a challenging aspect for second language learners of English, especially for learners whose native language is linguistically distant from English such as Arabic. This study investigates the frequency of using lexical cohesion by Arab ESL undergraduate students studying at the intensive English course at Ohio…

Students in a course on the psychology of language and thought first wrote flash fiction stories and analyzed them using course concepts. As an experiential learning exercise, they subsequently analyzed those stories for a number of psycholinguistic variables using the discourse technology Coh-Metrix. Their assignment was to change a number of…

Argumentation schema theory guided four experiments on the processing of plausible and implausible reasons and warrant statements testing the hypothesis that most reasons produce greater agreement with claims than when claims are presented without support. Another hypothesis was that leaving warrants unstated often produces greater agreement than…

A two-semester-long interdisciplinary support effort to improve student posters in organic chemistry lab is described. In the first semester, students' literature search report is supported by a workshop conducted by an Instruction Librarian. During the subsequent semester, a second workshop is presented by the Instruction Librarian, an English…

The present study discusses the relevance of measures of lexical diversity (LD) to the assessment of learner corpora. It also argues that existing measures of LD, many of which have become specialized for use with language corpora, are fundamentally measures of lexical repetition, are based on an etic perspective of language, and lack construct…

This article explores the literacy narratives of two "gamers" to demonstrate the kinds of literacy skills that many students actively involved in computer and video gaming are developing during their play. This analysis becomes part of a larger claim about the necessity of re-visioning the place of gaming in composition curricula.…

Enhancing critical thinking skills for undergraduate students is important across the curriculum and between disciplines. We report on a method of improving critical thinking skills, which was studied through an Ethics and Science First-Year Seminar course. We used full cycle assessment over a three-year period to assess students' development and…