Poor student engagement with academic readings has been frequently reported in college classrooms. As an effort to improve college students' reading engagement, researchers have developed a virtual environment in which students take on the role of tutor and teach a virtual tutee, the virtual tutee system (VTS). This research examined the…

An adaptation of the traditional literary concept of close reading was developed for use in a largely multilingual classroom in which both first language (L1) and second language (L2) students were struggling to comprehend theoretical, lexically dense texts in English. This simplified method of reading a text iteratively and critically is proving…

Dialogic teaching--a pedagogical approach that involves students in a collaborative construction of meaning and is characterized by shared control over the key aspects of classroom discourse--has been largely advocated by contemporary research and theory. However, studies in the US and UK continue to document the persistence of monologic…

A reading-writing initiative began in 2011-12 at the University of Toronto as a partnership between an East Asian Studies (EAS) department and an English Language Learning (ELL) Program. In this institution, students are expected to enter into scholarly discussions in their first year essays, yet many (both native English speakers and non-native…

At the Danish University School of Education we have experimented with a form of assessment called "active participation". A week before each class students are given reading guidelines and questions to help them approach the texts, and on the basis of one of those questions the students each write a two-page essay. The students are…