When it comes to academic work, students with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) often have the required knowledge but struggle to get their thoughts down in writing. This is a practical guide to teaching and improving writing skills in students with ASD to meet academic writing standards and prepare for the increased expectations of higher education.…

This article introduces a pedagogical intervention that includes a set of creative activities designed to improve the oral and written production of students in the English classroom, especially those who have shown a lack of interest or attention. It was observed that participants initially seemed careless about studying the language. Eventually…

Prereading questions can be an effective tool for directing students' learning. However, it is not always clear what the online effects of a set of prereading questions will be. In two experiments, this study investigated whether readers direct additional attention to and learn more from sentences that are potentially relevant to a set of…

The Common Core State Standards emphasize the value of teaching students to engage with complex text. But what exactly makes a text complex, and how can teachers help students develop their ability to learn from such texts? The authors of this article discuss five factors that determine text complexity: vocabulary, sentence structure, coherence,…

Reading comprehension requires thoughtful interactions between the reader, the text, and the author. The author may assist the reader in building meaning by creating purposefully crafted conversations that are organized into predictable patterns also known as patterned books. In this article, three predictable patterns found within children's text…

Teachers of reading in secondary schools know how important it is for low-attaining readers to read whole narratives but time to do this in a crowded curriculum is limited and progress is more easily measured through reading smaller parts of texts. This paper reports on a longitudinal critical action research project in which three English…

This paper presents the results of a predicative analysis led on comparison and problem-solution texts produced by pupils of the second and third grades of primary school following a set of reading and writing instructional activities. The production of those texts is of a special challenge to the young writers because of the cognitive and…

In contemporary contexts, young people are accustomed to life story; indeed, their lives are saturated with constructions of their stories and those of others, whether created by themselves or their "friends" on social networks. Multimedia outlets convey often detailed stories of more-famous others, whether celebrities or those experiencing…

This article highlights aspects of an interdisciplinary (chemistry-applied linguistics) English for Specific Purposes (ESP) course- and materials-development project. The project was aimed at raising genre awareness among chemistry students and faculty, in addition to improving students' disciplinary reading and writing. As part of the project,…

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…

We examined whether inserting spaces between words in Chinese text would help children learn to read new vocabulary. We recorded adults' and 7- to 10-year-old children's eye movements as they read new 2-character words, each embedded in four explanatory sentences (the learning session). Participants were divided into learning subgroups--half read…

Teachers need a deeper understanding of the texts being discussed, in particular the various textual and visual aspects of picturebooks themselves, including the images, written text and design elements, to support how readers made sense of these texts. As teachers become familiar with aspects of literary criticism, art history, visual grammar,…

Research suggests that experts and beginners use qualitatively different writing processes when given the same text to write. Throughout their writing, experts tend to create a network of executive, structural, and content problems that they continually refine and coordinate as they bring the text to fruition. Novices, in contrast, tend to focus…

This article addresses the relationship among theories related to classroom language and literacy events by first examining the researcher's theoretical perspective on discourse and sociocultural theories of learning development. The analytical heuristic for a microethnographic approach using a variety of theoretical tools is discussed and…

In this review of the literature we examine empirical studies designed to teach the structure strategy to increase reading comprehension of expository texts. First, we review the research that has served as a foundation for many of the studies examining the effects of text structure instruction. Text structures generally can be grouped into six…