Synthesizing academic literature into new knowledge through writing is a core skill that doctoral students engaged in research must learn. However, developing efficacy in synthesis skills as an academic writer is a culturally and cognitively demanding process that occurs over many years, requires abstraction, and draws upon critical reading…

This article seeks to discuss the relations between reading and writing against the historical backdrop of the initial affirmation of the "studia humanitatis" in fifteenth-century renaissance Italy and its initial movement towards the North of Europe. It focuses first on the theory of education and learning expressed in the Treatises of…

The CercleS version of the European Language Portfolio (ELP) has been used with language degree students at the University of Padova since the academic year 2002-2003. The courses into which it is embedded are generally blended: lessons take place in traditional classrooms and in the multimedia language laboratory, and students work online in…