The use of digital environments for both learning and assessment is becoming prevalent. This often leads to incongruent situations, in which the study medium (eg, printed textbook) is different from the testing medium (eg, online multiple-choice exams). Despite some evidence that incongruent study-test situations are associated with inferior…

MOCCA-C is an assessment of adult reading ability designed for early diagnosis of reading problems, for formative assessment in reading intervention planning, for assessment of reading improvement over time, and for assessment of reading intervention outcomes. It uses both narrative and expository reading passages and it currently has four forms.…

Crossing the threshold from high school to college-level writing expectations constitutes a challenge for many students since secondary and post-secondary composition instructors often work under different constraints and are guided by different curricular philosophies. Dual enrollment classrooms provide a space where these differences can be…

This study was intended to determine whether or not the genre of a reading text affects the incidental vocabulary acquisition of L2 learners while reading. To this aim, 40 Iranian EFL students whose vocabulary knowledge was within a limited range (already determined by Nation's Vocabulary Levels Test) were divided into two groups of 20 each for…

Reports on a study in which college students differing in verbal ability read and evaluated their comprehension of expository passages. Results revealed both quantitative and qualitative differences in the evaluation standards used. (HOD)

A study compared university students' Japanese and English native-language essays (22 expository, 24 persuasive) in terms of organization and macrolevel discourse features. Results indicate inductive rhetorical patterns were more common in Japanese than English essays and more common in persuasive than expository mode across languages. However,…

This article presents findings from a questionnaire survey of 136 male students, 62 with dyslexia and 74 without dyslexia, from 17 British higher education institutions. The students with dyslexia reported difficulties with a wide range of skills and academic tasks, notably note taking, organization of essays and expressing ideas in writing. They…

A study compared written texts produced by hand, by typewriter, and by word processor for differences in improvement in creativity and writing skills. Subjects included six college students--two with high creative ability, two with average creative ability, and two with low or weak ability. During a training period, the subjects were required to…

A study was designed (1) to test whether adult writing is superior to adult speech in terms of organization and content and (2) to assess college students' ability to discriminate between passages differing in quality. Written and spoken passages that compared and contrasted two entities were elicited from college students and adult professionals.…

A university writing faculty conducted a study of the concepts of unity in expository prose and of sentence structure as understood by Arabic, Malay, and Spanish speakers to discover why some students grasp some concepts more readily than others. Interviews, surveys, and analysis of written compositions revealed that the reason lies in ways these…

As a step toward developing appropriate instructional techniques to help learning disabled college students, mechanical errors were compared in the expository essays and controlled stimulus passages (rewrites) of 15 learning disabled, 15 normal, and 15 basic writers at the college level. Analysis of both types of writing samples showed that…

A study to find patterns of cohesion and rhetorical structure that distinguish good from weak English essay writing is described. The corpus consisted of ten Swedish college essays written as part of the final exam in a first-year English course. Methodological problems encountered included the delimitation of units for the analysis of cohesive…

A study with 28 fourth graders, 30 eighth graders, and 30 college students demonstrates that the relationship between knowledge of the requirements of a globally coherent essay and the ability to produce such an essay generally remains statistically significant when the effect of grade level is removed. (SLD)