This paper analyzes writing tasks in academic writing textbooks for Japanese university students, focusing on the organization and difficulty of these tasks based on the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR). A total of 411 writing tasks from 30 textbooks were coded by two experienced Japanese English teachers. The author…

We study the automatic identification of educational items worthy of content authors' attention. Based on the results of such analysis, content authors can revise and improve the content of learning environments. We provide an overview of item properties relevant to this task, including difficulty and complexity measures, item discrimination, and…

Since the introduction of task-based language teaching, tasks have become an integral component of the curriculum, ESL classrooms, and ELT coursebooks in the Philippines. Hence, this study examines the complexity of tasks in selected ELT coursebooks. Specifically, this study sought to determine the complexity features of tasks per grade level and…

This study is about artificial neural network modeling of the linguistic challenges encountered by students learning Turkish as a foreign language in universities in France. The study was conducted in four universities where Turkish is taught as an optional foreign language. Sixty-six students whose mother tongues were either Arabic or French…

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) require students to read and comprehend complex content texts. They specify three dimensions of a text that simultaneously contribute to text complexity across the curriculum: qualitative dimensions, quantitative dimensions, and reader and task considerations. In literacy instruction, recognizing and…

The study aims to explore how 18 M.A. TESOL students, who are prospective or experienced ESL/EFL teachers, perceive poetry writing in a second language. A qualitative interview-based design was utilized. Following Iida's (2012a) analytical framework in examining EFL students' perceptions toward writing haiku in English, this current study…

The purpose of this study is to consider the Turkish learning situations of the 16 Arab-origin students learning Turkish at TÖMER subordinate to a state university in the Aegean region from the perspectives of both students and the teachers who teach them Turkish and investigate their language learning experiences from many perspectives. In order…

This study of English as a second language (ESL) reading textbooks investigates cohesion in reading passages from 27 textbooks. The guiding research questions were whether and how cohesion differs across textbooks written for beginning, intermediate, and advanced second language readers. Using a computational tool called Coh-Metrix, textual…

This study extends research on manifestations of gender insensitivity in learners' reading materials by shifting attention to the linguistic strategies that authors of current texts employ for the realisation of gender sensitivity. We analysed the content of 12 current (2014) English workbooks (Grade 4-6) used in South African government and…

The objective of this research is to identify and suggest solutions to the problems experienced by students learning Turkish as a second language according to the opinions of both teachers and students evaluated. The research has been conducted among the classroom teachers, Turkish language teachers and the students attending the schools in…

Despite the spread of reliable technological tools and the availability of computers in Iranian universities, as well as the mounting evidence of the effectiveness of blended learning, many Iranian language teachers are still reluctant to incorporate such tools in their English as a foreign language (EFL) classes. This study inspected the status…

A readability formula for elementary Spanish instructional materials was developed by building on previous research, particularly in regard to the application of the Fry readability graph to Spanish language materials. The study began with the selection of average sentence length and number of syllables per 100 words as independent variables.…

The 12th iteration of the International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM 2019) is organized under the auspices of the International Educational Data Mining Society in Montreal, Canada. The theme of this year's conference is EDM in Open-Ended Domains. As EDM has matured it has increasingly been applied to open-ended and ill-defined tasks…

Spanish and English readability formulas were applied to sample passages from learning materials and textbooks used in bilingual classrooms in order to ascertain their analytic and predictive capabilities. Two main factors, word difficulty and sentence difficulty, accounted for most of the total variance in readability research using factor…

A study analyzed language-related and non-language-related textbooks used in India's secondary schools for compatibility of content across related curricular areas. The textbooks prescribed for standards 5 and 6 in Kannada, Hindi, and English for both State and Central school systems were analyzed. Language texts were analyzed for linguistic,…