"Under-preparedness" of students entering higher education is an issue that many academic institutions in South Africa are currently trying to address. Such students are seen as disadvantaged, lacking the skills, knowledge and/or language proficiency to navigate their way to success in higher education. This paper seeks to identify…

This article analyses the teaching and learning of South Sudan history from 1955--2005 in secondary schools in South Sudan with a specific focus on national unity. The article draws on two periods of focused ethnography, from September to December 2014 and July to September 2015, including classroom observation and interviews with teachers,…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the categories of preposition errors made by EFL learners of elementary and intermediate proficiency levels by comparing the rate of preposition errors (addition, omission, substitution) to their total preposition uses in their essays, and by comparing the overall preposition usage of learners of both…

The author, who teaches the English Methods class in the credential program, knew from entries in students' Writer's Reader's Notebooks (Rief) that they were struggling with the articles assigned about a five-paragraph essay. Following a discussion of form-first instruction and CCSS assessments, this article provides concrete suggestions for…

This author argues that developing the practice of empathy is fundamental to becoming an expert teacher.

Aim/Purpose: Quality in higher education assumes the challenge of developing in all citizens of the 21st century the cognitive, motivational, and socio-cultural dimensions that provide them with communication competences including the use of information and communication technologies, for the dissemination of sustainable scientific knowledge in…

The essays below were prepared following the LRA session organized by Janice Almasi entitled, "Examining the relative contributions of content knowledge and strategic processing to comprehension." What unites these essays are the personal and historical stances that each writer has taken; in addition, the essays are rich with…

This article advances film as worthy of rhetorical inquiry and deserving of more sustained attention in the advanced composition classroom. The first section identifies various approaches to the "language" of film, which can be adopted to navigate the technical, rhetorical, and cultural concerns needed to compose informed multimodal…

This essay review examines four different movies that directly or indirectly refer to the theme of private tutoring or, as it is widely called, shadow education. The movies, directed in locations as diverse as India, Turkey, and Cambodia, are all made from a critical perspective. The directors demonstrate challenges in public education systems and…

Testing has been shown to enhance retention of learned information beyond simple studying, a phenomena known as test-enhanced learning (TEL). Research has shown that TEL effects are greater for tests that require the production of responses [e.g., short-answer questions (SAQs)] relative to tests that require the recognition of correct answers…

Although the French Renaissance sceptic Michel de Montaigne (1533-92) is a much-admired thinker among many literary historians and some philosophical ones, his oeuvre hardly features in critical surveys of ideas in education. This is strange given that Montaigne offers modern educators an exemplary form of communicative discourse which anticipates…

In group writing, a group works together to compose a well-written text. Web 2.0 has bolstered web-based group writing among linguistic scholars and language teachers. This research examined the impact of web-based group writing on intermediate-level sophomore students majoring in English in colleges in Saudi Arabia. It considered the students'…

This study investigates the extent to which microfeatures -- such as basic text features, readability, cohesion, and lexical diversity based on specific word lists -- affect Chinese EFL writing quality. Data analysis was conducted using natural language processing, correlation analysis and stepwise multiple regression analysis on a corpus of 268…

Endeavors have been invested to account for inefficient instruction, which is frequently attributed to disregarding learner idiosyncrasies. As a matter of course, differentiated instruction has begun to receive scholarly and professional attention in the hopes of ameliorating learner outcomes through learner-aware teaching. Despite a great deal of…

This study investigated how one type of learner-generated information and content, i.e. inter-group peer online feedback, provided on a wiki writing assignment for an English for Academic Purposes (EAP) course, could contribute to student L2 writing. Using a mixed method approach, more than 1000 entries of online peer comments were collected,…