Schema is one of the most common terms used for classifying and constructing knowledge. Therefore, a schema is a pre-planned set of concepts. It usually contains social information and is used to represent chain of events, perceptions, situations, relationships and even objects. For example, Kant initially defines the idea of schema as some…

The Interface Hypothesis (Sorace, 2000) developed in line with the Minimalist theory of grammar (Chomsky, 1995 et seq.) supports the view of L2 acquisition that syntactic properties are acquired early while the acquisition of interface properties is delayed. One of the interface properties is inflectional morphology on English verbs, which…

Reading critically involves examining the language choices authors make to "get the job done" -- in other words, to communicate effectively in specific ways with particular audiences. Not all students in middle and high school intuit this type of reading and may experience challenges when they go to write for academic purposes. Their…

This study aimed to profile the sublexical, lexical, and text level language skills, and cognitive processes of a sub-group of children with poor reading comprehension known as poor comprehenders. An assessment protocol was developed to assess each of the components from Perfetti and Stafura's Reading Systems Framework. A comprehensive profile was…

Acknowledgement appears at the forefront of the high-stakes academic genre of thesis/dissertation writing. Previous research shows the generic structure of acknowledgements written by native Persian postgraduate students contains a 'thanking-God move', absent in native English speakers' acknowledgements. In an approximate replication of Hyland's…

The present paper explores the implications of parallel narrative structure in Paul Harding's "Tinkers" (2009). Besides primarily recounting the two sets of parallel narratives, "Tinkers" also comprises of seemingly unrelated fragments such as excerpts from clock repair manuals and diaries. The main stories, however, told…

In argument diagrams, perceptual cues are important to aid understanding. However, we do not know what perceptual cues are used and produced to aid understanding. We present two studies in which we investigate (1) which spatial, graphical and textual elements people spontaneously use in creating for-against argument diagrams, and (2) how people…

This study aimed to investigate the readability of the fifth-, sixth, seventh and eighth-grade mathematics course books prepared in deference to the 2017 curriculum and distributed to schools by MEB. This study utilized the descriptive document analysis which is a qualitative research method. Readability of the mathematics course books were…

School counselors write letters of recommendation for students pursuing postsecondary education and help teachers and staff prepare for this task. Although letters of recommendation may impact admission and scholarship opportunities, research about equity and bias in letters is minimal as compared to standardized tests, teacher expectations, and…

This study was carried out in order to search the effects of teaching informative text structures through processual model on the reading comprehension skills of 4th grade students. The research was designed in accordance with experimental model with pre-test-post-test control groups. The study group of the study consisted of 62 fourth grade…

The notion of "textuality" encouraged Halliday and Hasan in 1976 to present their model of discourse analysis through raising questions about whether "cohesion" was a semantic concept or a structural relation, whether a text was a structural unit or not or even if there were semantic or structural relationships within a text.…

This study investigated the impact of conversational agent formality on the quality of summaries and formality of written summaries during the training session and on posttest in a trialog-based intelligent tutoring system (ITS). During training, participants learned summarization strategies with the guidance of conversational agents who spoke one…

Reading rate, usually measured in words per minute, is a common operationalization of reading fluency in second language (L2) research and pedagogy. However, the impact of word length is often not addressed. This paper presents two studies showing how the number of characters in a text influences L2 reading time, independent of word counts, within…

In this study, we propose a link between L2 rhetorical concepts and ELF as a way of the analysis of the development of a single concept, of an EFL college student's rhetorical knowledge. Using Vygotskian sociocultural theory as analytical lenses, we examine whether L2 rhetoric can be mastered and internalized as a culturally neutral concept, i.e.,…

Cognitive organizers (COs) are text aids which represent objects, concepts, and their relations by the use of symbols and spatial arrangements without adding to semantic content. The present study examines language learners' text comprehension through outlines, a popular CO, compared with text-only condition, and further investigates the effect of…