This study investigated the effects of auditory and audiovisual text presentation on the three levels of mental representations assumed in theories of discourse processing. A sample of 106 children aged 7, 9, and 11 years listened to 16 short narrative texts, 8 of which were accompanied by a series of pictures illustrating the content.…

"Writing is a core skill for living, not just for school," writes high school English teacher Penny Kittle. Although it's important to teach students the conventions of grammar, punctuation, and sentence structure, teachers don't need to approach this task "like scolds, red pens in hand, stamping out sin, and punishing…

The authors asked fifth-grade and eighth-grade students to pose stories for number sentences involving the addition and subtraction of integers. In this article, the authors look at eight stories from students. Which of these stories works for the given number sentence? What do they reveal about student thinking? When the authors examined these…

Teaching scientific writing in biology classes is challenging for both students and instructors. This article offers and reviews several useful "toolkit" items that improve student writing. These include sentence and paper-length templates, funnelling and compartmentalisation, and preparing compendiums of corrections. In addition,…

This study focuses on the pedagogical applications of structural priming research in an English for academic purposes (EAP) context, investigating whether priming activities are an effective tool for eliciting production of target grammatical structures. University students across four EAP classes carried out a total of 6 information-exchange…

Previous research has found that the single argument of unaccusative verbs (such as "fall") is reactivated during sentence processing, but the argument of agentive verbs (such as "jump") is not ( and ). An open question so far was whether this difference in processing is caused by a difference in thematic roles the verbs assign, or a difference in…

The rich learning resources and contexts learners experience in their everyday life could play important roles in complementing formal learning, but are often neglected by learners and teachers. In this paper, we present an intervention study in "Move, Idioms!", a mobile-assisted Chinese language learning approach that emphasizes contextualized…

This study presents an efficient approach to personalized mispronunciation detection of Taiwanese-accented English. The main goal of this study was to detect frequently occurring mispronunciation patterns of Taiwanese-accented English instead of scoring English pronunciations directly. The proposed approach quickly identifies personalized…

This paper outlines a case study conducted in two public schools in the greater Toronto area as a complementary component of a multisite experimental study exploring educational game development as a learning activity for motivating and engaging students in curriculum-related literacy activities (Owston et al., 2007). Researchers studied children…

Suggests teaching a variety of sentence beginnings in writing instruction. (AEA)

In this paper, we present a synchronous text-based communication tool, referred to as Adaptive Communication Tool (ACT), which provides capabilities for adaptation and personalization. ACT supports both the free and the structured form of dialogue. The structured dialogue is implemented by two types of Scaffolding Sentence Templates (SST); i.e.…

The two essays in this booklet reflect the spirit and ideas of Francis Christensen, specifically his exhortations to composition teachers, illustrated by his own practice, to approach the teaching of writing inductively, to look always to the writing of professionals for models, and to behave as scholars. The first essay, on sentence modelling,…

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…

Emphasizes that traditional textbook explanations of the preterite and imperfect tend to focus on their aspectual differences. The article argues that a comprehensive analysis of the interaction of these two tenses in narration must go beyond aspect to include their respective temporal and discourse properties. (30 references) (Author/CK)