A number of linguistic studies on courtroom discourse deal with witness examinations, however counsels' opening statements have been given relatively little attention. Drawing on the analysis of a Crown Prosecutor's opening statement in a murder trial held at the Supreme Court of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, and using the Systemic…

The twenty-first century has seen an increased call to train students to craft mathematical arguments. The third of the Common Core's (CCSS) Standards for Mathematical Practice (SMP 3) (CCSSI 2010) calls for all mathematically proficient students to "construct viable arguments" to support the truth of their ideas and to "critique…

The purpose of this research is to identify discourse markers used in justification types in Turkish language teacher candidates' argumentative texts. Survey model was used since it was aimed to determine the categories into which support and refutation justifications are split and to identify the discourse markers which express these categories.…

Public discourse concerning STEM has an increasing influence on mathematics education, yet the exact role that mathematics plays in STEM is hard to define. I compare STEM to numeracy to investigate how mathematics is repositioned in these two discourses. Each is analysed in terms of rhetorics that argue for the worth of mathematics education.…

Academic history has begun only relatively recently to study films as historical sources, and thus far it has focused principally on feature films to the exclusion of nonfictional cinema, despite the use of educational films for propaganda as early as the interwar period. This essay examines the extent to which educational films of this period…

This dissertation conducts rhetorical criticism of the public controversy prompted by higher education reforms proposed by Texas Governor Rick Perry in his 2008 "Seven Breakthrough Solutions" packet and summit. The analysis begins by exploring "topoi," or commonplace arguments, raised during the argumentation between Perry and…

Although several studies have investigated the self-assessment (SA) of writing skills, most research has adopted a cross-sectional research design. Consequently, our knowledge about the longitudinal development of SA is limited. This study investigated whether SA instruction leads to improvement in SA accuracy and in second language (L2) writing.…

Many empirical findings of previous studies have suggested a connection between motivational factors and L2 writing. Nonetheless, the impact of motivational factors on the genre-based L2 writing has not gained much attention. The present study explored the extent to which the characteristics of two writing tasks involving different genres interact…

This study explores how syntactic complexity and lexical complexity vary in argumentative essays written by L2 learners of English at B2 and C1 CEFR proficiency levels. We approach both syntactic complexity and lexical complexity from a multi-dimensional perspective, examining syntactic complexity at different levels (i.e., global, clausal, and…

Fall 2020 presented myriad challenges for teachers trying to plan curricula to meet students' social-emotional and learning needs following an unprecedented spring and summer of isolation and loss due to the pandemic caused by SARS-CoV-2 (Rivera and Wallace 2020). The result of creative planning and adjusting of curricula for remote instruction…

Challenges of English for specific purposes (ESP) course development and instruction have still been reported in a number of studies. They could affect ESP teachers' belief and confidence in their ability to do such tasks. This qualitative case study explores the development of self-efficacy, along with source information concerning challenges in…

Analytical reading and writing are embedded in a disciplinary approach to history instruction and present opportunities to extend students' literacy practices. U.S. educators and researchers have come to rely on the Document-Based Question (DBQ) to assess and develop students' historical knowledge and argument writing. However, this task has been…

Democracy is based on individuals' ability to give their opinions freely. To do this, they must have access to a multitude of reliable information sources (Dahl, 1998), and this greatly depends on the characteristics of their media environments. Today, one of the main issues individuals face is the significant amount of disinformation circulating…

The current study presents the findings of a pre-test/post-test design to explore the efficacy of a genre-based approach to teaching argumentative essay writing during synchronous classes. The study is conducted with the participation of a group of freshman and junior year student teachers of English Language Teaching enrolled at the course of…

In this paper, we describe the design for PurpleState, an internship simulation that applies the epistemic game model for informed civic learning. PurpleState places students in the role of interns at a political media firm and asks them to design a media campaign on a state level policy issue. Unlike the use of these models in STEM education,…