The ability to express yourself concisely and coherently is a crucial skill, both for academic purposes and professional careers. An important aspect to consider in writing is an adequate segmentation of ideas, which in turn requires a proper understanding of where to place paragraph breaks. However, these decisions are often performed…

This short paper reports the findings of a study exploring English for Academic Purposes (EAP) students' behavioral intention to use a high-immersion Virtual Reality (VR) system for learning paragraph structure. The study measured relationships between variables that may lead to learners' intention to use the high-immersion VR Reality system…

The poster discusses the possibilities of technology-assisted peer feedback in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) writing classrooms among low proficiency students. It is a part of an ongoing research project developed after a study conducted in the first half of 2019 (Lazic & Tsuji, 2020a, 2020b). The first goal is to explore the…

An alternative to the traditional surface measures of text complexity is put forward. The background to the study is an attempt to provide a useful analysis of educational courses being prepared on a text-processor system. The analysis is primarily concerned with one aspect of cohesion in text, the use of rhetorical connectives or items of…

Extralexical information, that is, those semantic properties evoked by words which are not usually accommodated in lexicons of any kind, is essential for the comprehension of numerous ordinary sentences in a natural language. A brief review of studies on forms of extralexical information shows that those works do not deal with: (1) questions of…

The "controlling statement," a method of teaching students to write in an organized and efficient manner, consists of three basic parts: the idea, the viewpoint, and the key terms. Once introduced to students, these three parts can be easily used throughout the year (or years) to refer to basic areas within the composition process. This method of…

When the literature and the research results on sentence combining are analyzed, they seem to provide an expanded meaning of sentence combining and reasons for its effects on the writing of some students. Gains in syntactic maturity alone do not explain why sentence combining affects positively the writing of some students, nor does the fact that…

To avoid confusing children, a reading approach from the very beginning should stress logical relationships based on experiences. Drilling words, sounds, or even sentences should be avoided since these practices lead to deviant schemes. A lifetime scheme involves teaching a child a process. Children need to learn a process by which they can…

In spite of the growth in popularity of sentence combining over the last 20 years, few teachers use it in technical writing classes, either because the exercises are inappropriate or because teachers fear that sentence combining will teach students to write longer rather than better sentences. Sentence combining can, however, teach technical…

In this study, the effect of a passage organizer (topic sentence) on the ability to identify main ideas was tested. The second purpose of this study was to determine whether main idea comprehension is affected by the type of main idea question asked. Thirty third- and thirty fourth-grade children selected on a random basis from a semi-rural…

The purpose of this study to determine if information high in the logical structure of a passage tends to be recalled better than information low in the structure. Two groups of 24 Cornell undergraduates participated in the experiment. Subjects in each group read and recalled three passages. Group one read the Breeder Reactor High, Schizophrenia…

A study investigated the influence of goal setting and progress feedback on self-efficacy and writing achievement among gifted children. Thirty-three fourth graders who previously had been identified as academically gifted in language arts received writing strategy instruction over 20 sessions and were given a goal of learning to use the strategy…

Two methods of outlining are suggested for college-level students of English as a second language (ESL) who need the tools to master rhetorical patterns of academic written English that may be very different from those in their native languages. The two outlining techniques separate the four logically distinct tasks in the process of outlining:…

A crucial concept in Francis Christensen's principles of writing involves the "addition," which may be construed as any grammatical unit that is not a main clause. Obviously the effect of rhetorical writing derives mainly from the number of additions as well as from their placement and function within the single sentence. By means of…

This paper explains the teaching strategy inherent in the model expository-paragraph program, a plan for middle-school, student writing based on imitation of and reaction to a model paragraph written by the teacher. The model paragraph provides material for the teaching of spelling, grammar, and composition skills and is a springboard for creative…