This qualitative study examined a five-day summer professional development workshop for English language arts teachers on argument writing. Fourteen teacher participants learned from five different professionals who discussed the role of argument in their fields. Teacher blog posts were coded to understand what teacher participants perceived as…

This study investigated how candidates claimed to have made an original contribution to knowledge in the conclusion chapters of 100 PhD theses. Documentary analysis was used to discover how this was explained within theses at selected universities in three countries. No other documents were accessed and neither were candidates, supervisors or…

This investigation applies two approaches for representing and comparing text structures as undirected network graphs to describe the influence of narrative and expository lesson texts on readers' knowledge structure elicited as free recall. Narrative and expository lesson texts and undergraduate participants' free recall essays (n = 90)…

Students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) represent an increasing number of learners in general education classrooms. While reading comprehension instruction has received growing attention, learners with ASD continue to experience poor academic outcomes. This article describes a research-based approach to teaching students with ASD to…

This study investigates the typical textual features that are most frequently targeted in short-answer reading comprehension questions of the Cambridge University "O" Level English Paper 2. Test writers' awareness of how textual features impact on understanding of meanings in text decisions will determine to great extent their decisions…

The field of topic modeling has become increasingly important over the past few years. Topic modeling is an unsupervised machine learning way to organize text (or image or DNA, etc.) information such that related pieces of text can be identified. This paper/session will present/discuss the current state of topic modeling, why it is important, and…

The purpose of this study is to explore the existing effect of gloss conditions on reading comprehension and vocabulary understanding of learners in the context of English as a foreign language. The study composed of 72 male students aged between 19 and 21 years selected from Qassim University in Saudi Arabia. The participants were divided into…

This study analyzed the potential transfer effects on reading comprehension skills of two different training programs administered to 9- to 10-year-old children attending fourth grade classes. One training program was based on a working memory updating paradigm (i.e., words, digits, sentence and text updating working memory tasks). The other…

The paper discusses argument pedagogy for graduate and professional students with learning disabilities (LD) in the context of academic writing. To understand the nature and types of writing problems that graduate and professional students with LD experience, the author presents results of a university-wide survey with the students who did and did…

This article presents a three-strand approach to help L2 writers in English as a foreign language (EFL) and English as a second language (ESL) instructional contexts achieve greater cohesion in their written work. The approach focuses on (1) the analysis of authentic texts, (2) the development of productive vocabulary, and (3) information…

Grammar; while originating from the natural structure of the language also is the system which makes it possible for different language functions meet within the body of common rules especially communication. Having command of the language used, speaking and writing it correctly require strong grammar knowledge actually. However only knowing the…

The prominence afforded to literacy in the Irish Primary School Curriculum has received considerable attention in recent years, spurred by Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) rankings, governmental priorities, public commentary and academic debate. At times, this discourse has presented literacy as a separate and distinct entity…

The Reading Acceleration Program (RAP), which uses adaptively increasing text erasure rates to enforce reading rate improvements, has been positively evaluated in various languages, reader and age groups. The current study compared the established incremental increase of text erasure rate with a training using fixed erasure rates in two groups of…

The primary purpose of the present study is to investigate whether reciprocal teaching approach or direct instruction approach is more effective in the teaching of k-map generation skill. Secondary purpose of the study is to determine which of the k-map generation principles are more challenging for students to apply. The results of the study…

The Common Core State Standards have cast a renewed light on reading instruction, presenting teachers with the new requirements to teach close reading of complex texts. Teachers and administrators should consider a number of essential features of close reading: They are short, complex texts; rich discussions based on worthy questions; revisiting…