This project classifies groups of small order using a group's center as the key feature. Groups of a given order "n" are typed based on the order of each group's center. Students are led through a sequence of exercises that combine proof-writing, independent research, and an analysis of specific classes of finite groups…

A qualitative think-aloud study, informed by social literacies and holistic bilingual perspectives, was conducted to examine how six emergent bilingual, Mexican American, fourth graders approached, interacted with, and comprehended narrative and expository texts in Spanish and English. The children had strong Spanish reading test scores, but…

Reading and comprehending content area texts require learners to effectively select and encode with hierarchically strategic memory structures in order to combine new information with prior knowledge. Unfortunately, evidence from state and national tests shows that children fail to successfully navigate the reading comprehension challenges they…

In San Francisco, a partnership between a K-8 school and a non-profit writing program helps students who are achieving below grade level find their voices and blossom into confident thinkers and writers. 826 Valencia is a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting under-resourced students ages six to eighteen with their creative and…

The present study examined possible memory and metacomprehension benefits of using a combined question self-generation and answering technique, relative to rereading, as a study strategy for expository passages. In the 2 question self-generation and answering conditions (detail or conceptual questions), participants were prompted on how to…

Words should be chosen and used carefully so that they convey the meaning or meanings that you intend--and do not convey any unintended or double meanings. Writing should leave little ambiguity or uncertainty about what you are referring to--unless some purposeful ambiguity is desired. Sometimes words that are abstract or superficial may be chosen…

In this study, we investigated criterial discourse features in L2 writing through the use of recurrent word combinations, a.k.a. lexical bundles, taking a corpus-driven and expert-judged approach by examining L2 English data across various proficiency levels from L1 Chinese learners. Proficiency was determined by a robust rating procedure which is…

The purpose of the present research is investigating the effects of reciprocal teaching in comprehending expository texts. The research was designed with mixed method. The quantitative dimension of the present research was designed in accordance with pre-test-post-test control group experiment model. The quantitative dimension of the present…

This study investigated micro- and macrostructural text features, and the impact of language-specific skills, on the bilingual, persuasive writing of 41 high school students learning English in Italy. Participants composed persuasive essays on 2 topics, each in Italian and English, and completed spelling and sentence generation tasks in both…

This study aims to explore the effectiveness of a paradigm to teach native Cantonese-speaking university students the hierarchical structure of expository prose to improve paragraph coherence. Most of the diagnostic argumentative essays the participants in this study wrote in the course were incoherent, failing to meet readers' expectation of…

In 2015, Fong, Finkelstein, Jaeger, Diaz, and Broek reported the findings from an independent evaluation of the Expository Reading and Writing Course (ERWC). The evaluation found positive and statistically significant effects of the ERWC on student achievement. Due to some concerns that the previously reported results in Fong et al. (2015) did not…

This study examined the effects of text type and early familiarization with oral expository text structures on listening and reading comprehension levels. Second-grade students read and listened to narrative and expository texts, and their comprehension was assessed with a sentence verification task. Half of the students had participated in a…

This study is concerned with clarity of writing at three levels of a written text: the clarity of each sentence, the "cohesion" of adjacent sentences, and the "coherence" of all sentences in the text taken together. Sentence-level clarity pertains to the clarity of the proposition expressed by it, cohesion pertains to the…

Three questions regarding adult readers' processing of generalization inferences (conceptually broad statements that subsume several specific statements) are investigated. College students (N=193) read expository texts containing target statements that were consistent, inconsistent, or off-topic in relation to a generalization implied by one…

Expository text offers particular challenges to the reader because of the abstract and unfamiliar concepts that it presents. In order to solve these problems in reading classes, students should be taught the hierarchical structure of the expository text and the interrelationships among ideas. This is what experts in this field refer to as text…