The employment of genre-based pedagogy and Task-Based Language Teaching in second language education is representative of a paradigmatic shift towards a focus on meaning-making. Despite this shift, second language acquisition (SLA) research continues to predominantly rely on complexity, accuracy, and fluency metrics to assess learner production…

Despite previous research suggesting that first language (L1) use fulfills important functions in collaborative writing (CW) tasks, research has yet to examine whether L1 or second language (L2) use may lead to variation in the lexico-grammatical aspects of learners' collaborative texts and the pair talk. Using a corpus-based approach, this study…

Writing skills are essential for success in the 21st-century school and workplace, but most classrooms devote far more time to reading instruction, with writing often addressed in isolation or excluded. In this insightful professional development resource and text, leading researchers discuss why and how to integrate writing and reading…

Research to guide text structure interventions for the primary grades is very limited, yet as early as in kindergarten, many state standards increasingly emphasize exposure to challenging expository texts. The purpose of the present study was to provide preliminary evidence of the feasibility and promise (or the effects) of three brief text…

Despite the preponderance of theoretical and empirical evidence that suggests the use of pair/group work to promote second language learning, it is still unclear who can best form high performance groups. Should students be allowed to choose their working partners, or should teachers themselves assign students to pairs? This study set out to…

This study was an attempt to investigate the possible effect of intertextuality-aware instruction of reading passages on a sample of intermediate EFL learners of both genders. First, the intertextuality deployed through the reading passages of the study's course-book was focused inspired by Fairclough's (192) framework in terms of genre, text…

Writing is a complex process, and this complexity poses particular challenges when researchers and teachers approach the task of analysing young students' writing samples. This paper outlines a program of research undertaken to develop a writing analysis tool. The tool is designed to map shifts over time in the range of skills and competencies…

Seventy-seven new academics--59 at a large, public university in the UK and 18 at a medium-sized, private comprehensive university in the USA--were asked to read an extract of an article on the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) and mark the text according to categories of difficulty or dislike. Analysis of the data revealed six main…

This study investigated the effectiveness of an instructional program designed to teach expository text comprehension during guided reading. Participants included 72 second graders in six classrooms, organized into four guided reading groups in each class (n = 24). The six classes were randomly assigned to one of three groups: Text Structure,…