By asking questions, students can practice many cognitive processes, and these processes may reflect clues about their thinking skills. In order to understand students' cognitive levels in thinking, questions can be used as agents. Doing so, this study focuses on examining students' questions in terms of cognitive levels of Bloom's revised…

Many adolescent readers experience difficulties comprehending informational text, which may result from underlying difficulties with foundational skills (e.g., word recognition and fluency), knowledge demands (e.g., background, text structure, and vocabulary), and/or reading motivation. Supplemental interventions for adolescents targeting only…

High school graduates should be able to read to complete everyday tasks. Without this ability, their quality of life could decline from the lack, a negative mindset, or both. Therefore, educational stakeholders aiding students with reading struggles must find the most effective solutions for these students. Students achieving below-average on…

The present study examines the ways Chinese high school EFL learners organize information in their writing. A class of 50 students at grade 9 from a local high school in Guangzhou, China, were recruited as participants. The students' writing at grade 9 was collected as a corpus, comprising ten writing tasks from different text types. In order to…

This paper explores the application of texture and textual attractors within a cognitive stylistic pedagogy for English teachers. Texture, defined as the feeling of building and experiencing a fictional world, is here taken up as a facilitative way of thinking about how reading, language, experience and cognition operate in the classroom. On the…

The ability to comprehend science texts is not only an academic skill but a life skill. Currently, however, the majority of students across grade levels in the United States are reading below grade level "and" have science achievement below grade level. The text structure strategy, a reading comprehension strategy in which students are…

The purpose of the study was to investigate differences in writers' abilities to perceive global text organisation in self-, peer- and teacher/researcher-authored essays. Eight student participants were identified as proficient, middle or developing, based on the levels of paragraph subordination, the average number of T-Units and the number of…

Mastering analytical writing involves the proficient use of varied later-acquired grammatical, lexical and discourse forms and functions. Developmental studies have identified specific linguistic features as diagnostic of increasing proficiency. This study examines how these features change throughout educational levels and before and after the…

This article introduces an approach that middle-school teachers can follow to help their students carry out linguistic-based literary analyses. As an example, it draws on Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) to show how J.K. Rowling used language to characterize Hermione as an intelligent female in "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows."…

Chloe Bateman recognised the value to her Key Stage 3 pupils of developing rich subject knowledge, but wanted to find a way of encouraging them to value that knowledge for themselves. In this article she explains how she provided that inspiration by setting her Year 7 class the challenge of writing convincing and engaging historical fiction set in…

Reading critically involves examining the language choices authors make to "get the job done" -- in other words, to communicate effectively in specific ways with particular audiences. Not all students in middle and high school intuit this type of reading and may experience challenges when they go to write for academic purposes. Their…

This study investigates the effectiveness of Modified Multi-Component Cognitive Strategy Instruction (MMCSI) on expository text comprehension skills of students with mild intellectual disability (ID). Three students participated from inclusion classes of three different secondary schools in Turkey. The study was conducted using a multiple probe…

The authors examined naturally occurring reading comprehension strategies instruction (RCSI) across four consecutive lessons in 47 Norwegian language arts classrooms at the lower secondary level via video observations (n = 178). Although numerous studies have examined the effectiveness of RCSI for improving reading outcomes, few studies have…

Explicit signals of important relationships in expository texts can provide efficient processing instructions for readers with strategic knowledge about text structures. However, such signal words do not help readers without strategic knowledge about use of text structures and signal words. This study provided the first detailed investigation…

This qualitative study examined a five-day summer professional development workshop for English language arts teachers on argument writing. Fourteen teacher participants learned from five different professionals who discussed the role of argument in their fields. Teacher blog posts were coded to understand what teacher participants perceived as…