Reading motivation is a fundamental basis for reading behavior and performance. For learners, interest is an exceedingly important component of reading motivation. Prior research has shown that students' text-based interest varies significantly between texts. However, it is still unclear why one text elicits greater interest over another.…

Just as classic Marxist writers are included among the world's top-class artists, Chinese Marxism has gradually nurtured a new tradition of modern aesthetics. This tradition serves to enlighten the people, cultivate their appreciation of artistic masterpieces, and thus establish a complete set of artistic systems that has been inspiring people to…

The focus of the article is Thematic Progression as a text and a genre forming phenomenon. Thematic Progression contributes to the cohesive development of any text, the distribution of given and new information of which needs to follow certain patterns. Thematic progression patterns deal with the set of meaningful sense groups which constitute a…

Scholarship in literacy and education has depicted reading as an active, multidimensional, and complex process. However, an often more reductive version of reading, close reading, has been advocated frequently for use in secondary and postsecondary literacy classrooms. The author examines materials created to help teachers implement close reading…

Poetry has often been described as the neglected genre despite its potential to engage and motivate students of all abilities in reading and writing. Indeed, poetry provides an excellent forum for the development of literacy skills and strategies in a meaningful context. The author describes how a teacher implemented a poetry genre study in a…

Set against the backcloth of increasing recognition and attention to literature in foreign language education (FLE) globally, this article reports part of a large-scale study of 1,190 secondary-level learners' views of the benefits of literature, as instantiated by short stories (ShS) and poems and songs (PS) in their English-as-a-foreign-language…

Complex noun phrases (NP) are central to mature academic writing and often a focus of explicit teaching. The National Curriculum in England, for example, requires specific components of NP complexity to be taught at specific educational stages. However, the evidence base for such practices is unclear. Research on the emergence of NP components is…

Identity currently features as a prominent theme in digital multimodal composition (DMC), given the significant impact of DMC on identity expression. However, L2 learners' writer identity development and fluctuation in this type of textual composition needs further exploration in light of the absence of clearly established DMC-specific identity…

This article reports the results of a qualitative study which explores the personal and professional identities construction journey of a migrant teacher of English as a second/additional language from Hong Kong, following her arrival in the United Kingdom. Grounded in a theory of language teacher identities and drawing upon Mikhail Bakhtin's…

Purpose: Morphological regularities are an important feature of the English writing system, and exposure to written morphology may be key in the development of skilled word recognition. Our aim was to investigate children's experiences of written morphology by analyzing a large-scale corpus of children's reading materials spanning a target age…

In this article, a native of Appalachia who has worked in secondary and post-secondary literacy education examines the ways that comics depict life in the region. Particular attention is given to the exploration of the paranormal found in the work of Brian Level, and Level serves as a first-hand voice in this researched work. Additionally, the…

Interest in the topic of wisdom-focused education has so far not resulted in empirically validated programs for teaching wisdom. To start filling this void, we explore the emerging empirical evidence concerning the fundamental elements required for understanding how one can foster wisdom, with a particular focus on wise reasoning. We define wise…

Gareth B. Matthews (1929-2011) inaugurated the study of philosophy in children's literature by simultaneously arguing (1) that philosophy is essentially an encounter with certain kinds of perplexities, (2) that genuine philosophical perplexities are readily found in many children's stories, and (3) that many children are capable of appreciating…

This study explored the relationship between linguistic features and the rated quality of letters of application (LAs) and argumentative essays (AEs) composed in English by Chinese college-level English as a foreign language (EFL) learners. A corpus of 260 LAs and 260 AEs were analyzed via a confirmatory factor analysis. Latent variables were EFL…

In a country where English is not a native language, the language course designs for undergraduate medical students may usually underscore the instruction of language itself (e.g., grammar). This study demonstrated how literature (i.e., stories in this study) and the practice of art were integrated into the pedagogy of English for Medical…