This paper offers readings of three examples from a photo-essay project undertaken in 2022 by a group of Year 7 pupils in Berlin. Many of the photo-essays centred on locations like schools, parks and shops, but also included places of worship, the graves of ancestors and evidence of family ties in other cities. Mirroring the practices of the…

Providing timely and helpful writing feedback for student writers, especially those at the middle and high school level, can present an unwieldy challenge for teachers. Yet, feedback is necessary for students' growth as writers. There is an increased interest and use of automatic writing programs to provide students with writing feedback. However,…

While the merits of dialogic talk for supporting students' learning is well documented, the contribution of specific talk moves on learning outcomes remains less understood. This study was conducted to investigate how student-generated talk moves during whole-classroom discussions, as captured by the Low-Inference Discourse Observation tool,…

Developing students' source-based argument writing skills is a vital educational goal for the 21st-century information society. Consequently, researchers and educators continually seek ways to understand and improve students' capacities for advancing arguments and synthesizing multiple documents, texts, or sources in a range of subject areas in…

This study explores the performance of two emergent bilingual (EB) learners--a fifth-grade girl from refugee parents and a seventh-grade boy with university professor parents--on Constructed Response Questions (CRQs) in the STAAR test. Using qualitative methods such as interviews and writing sample analysis, the research evaluates their responses…

Recent advances in automated writing evaluation have enabled educators to use automated writing quality scores to improve assessment feasibility. However, there has been limited investigation of bias for automated writing quality scores with students from diverse racial or ethnic backgrounds. The use of biased scores could contribute to…

Recent advances in automated writing evaluation have enabled educators to use automated writing quality scores to improve assessment feasibility. However, there has been limited investigation of bias for automated writing quality scores with students from diverse racial or ethnic backgrounds. The use of biased scores could contribute to…

Several studies have explored the effects of cognitive tools, such as scaffolding, on the quality of argumentation in online argumentation activities. However, although information searching is the most popular online activity, few studies have investigated the roles of online information resources in the quality of argumentation. This study…

Bilinguals often outperform monolinguals at apprehending the perspectives of others--an apparent consequence of their experiences moving across linguistic and sociocultural contexts. Whether English learners' (ELs') use of such skill in academic writing may be affected by literacy curriculum is the focus of this study. The study explored students'…

The research aims to enhance the handling of modal verbs (MVs) in EFL textbooks by leveraging perspectives from corpora that include both native speakers' language data and the language data of individuals who are learning the language. To assess the authenticity of language in textbooks, an analysis between the native corpus and a collection of…

In this study, the authors investigated the attitudes of Japanese junior high school students towards studying English from the perspective of the Self-worth Theory. A total of 383 students aged 12 to 15 years participated in the qualitative study. Students were required to write three essays about how they would react under hypothetical…

Increased expectations for writing performance have created a need for formative writing assessments that will help middle school teachers better understand adolescents' grade-appropriate writing skills and monitor the progress of students with or at risk for writing disabilities. In this practice piece, we first explain research-based…

We used the POW + TREE strategy within the self-regulated strategy development (SRSD) framework to teach six 6th graders with learning disabilities to write argumentative essays. A special education teacher implemented the intervention with high fidelity 5 days a week for 40 min each day. Students were grouped within three groups based on their…

Is it important to hear positions opposing one's own from others who genuinely believe them? We examine whether the thinking of those who engage in discourse with peers who hold an opposing view benefit by hearing arguments favoring the opposing position expressed by individuals known to hold this position. We report on 131 young adolescents who…

Visualizations may help students understand the network of connections among multiple documents. This study explored how ninth-grade students used a novel digital document mapping scaffold to construct models of multiple documents. We examined students' maps and mapping processes in order to understand how they used the scaffold to visually…