Ethnolinguistic minority students may have lower levels of metacognitive knowledge and English vocabulary knowledge than non-minority students. Nevertheless, few longitudinal studies have examined their growth trajectories of metacognitive knowledge and English vocabulary knowledge over time. Drawing upon a latent growth curve model, the present…

Factual writing is a key macrogenre of American K-12 schooling that is also valued in workplace and society. This study examined the genre and register features of two subgenres of factual writing--biography and report--composed by 48 sixth-grade students in a curriculum unit on scientists and science-related careers aimed at developing students'…

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the types of spelling errors made by children with mild to moderate hearing loss (CMMHL) compared with children with typical hearing (TH) and to determine if types of spelling errors were related to linguistic or audiologic factors. CMMHL and TH completed measures of spelling, spoken language, speech…

This study examines associations between writing instruction with a focus on explicit sentence syntax and reading comprehension in a sample of students receiving special education services. While the outcome data does not show direct causation between student enrollment in a treatment writing course using Systemic Functional Linguistics and…

The ability to manage specific forms of disciplinary expression - Languages of Schooling - is regarded as a factor of academic success (Council of Europe recommendations - Council of Europe CM/Rec. [2014]. "Recommendation of the Committee of Ministers to Member States on the Importance of Competences in the Language(s) of Schooling for Equity…

Middle school students are learning about climate change in large part through textbooks used in their classes. Therefore, it is crucial to understand how the language employed in these materials frames this topic. To this end, we used systemic functional analysis to study the language of the chapters related to climate change in four sixth grade…

This research examined differences between dyslexic, poor and normal readers who learn in the same educational framework, across various linguistic and meta-linguistic skills in Hebrew as the first language (L1) and English as a foreign language (FL), following an intervention program focusing on English linguistic skills. The participants…

The current study investigated the contribution of two linguistic intervention programs, phonological and morphological to the development of word spelling among skilled and poor native Arabic readers, in three grades: second, fourth and sixth. The participants were assigned to three experimental groups: morphological intervention, phonological…

The writing achievement of English learners (ELs) is often lower than that of other subgroups (Fry, 2007, 2008). To address this gap, a partnership was formed between university faculty and doctoral students and educators at an urban PK-8 school with a majority EL population. Using Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) as a guide, the team…

Writing is difficult for students who are learning English, as they often struggle to express what they really want to say. Writing is difficult for their teachers, too, who often struggle to respond in ways that are helpful. In this article, the authors offer an approach that looks at students' writing from a functional linguistics perspective,…

This paper compares the development of linguistic fluency in the writing of 5th-8th grade, U.S. students enrolled in English as a Second Language (ESL, n=189) and regular language arts (RLA, n=546) classes. Linguistic fluency is defined as the use of linguistic structures appropriate to rhetorical and social purposes and is measured using five…

The research and the study focus on the problem of dissociated learning. Why do students fail to connect with knowledge? The purposes of the study are: to summarize research pertaining to brain growth; to describe educational approaches and tactics consistent with this research; to test a brain research-based program designed to connect children…