In an age where getting an answer is as easy as a well-chosen phrase typed into a search engine, it is important for teachers to be more interested in "how" students know, rather than "what" students know. In the sea of available information today, students must provide answers based on evidence. A student's ability to explain…

This article reports the results of a study that assesses the effectiveness of a Philosophy in Schools (PIS) program in developing English as a Second Language (ESL) students' thinking skills and English competence in Hong Kong. In the study, training and support were provided for two English teachers to enable them to teach PIS to their Secondary…

This 4-year longitudinal study examined the extent to which morphological awareness, syntactic processing, working memory (WM) and reading skills predict unique variances developmentally in three genres of Chinese writing (narration, argumentation and exposition) among 246 young Mandarin-speaking children. Hierarchical regression analyses were…

We assessed the influence of genre-specific discourse knowledge and writing goals on the persuasive writing of 4th and 6th grade students with and without learning disabilities (LD). Students were first interviewed about their knowledge of persuasion and persuasive writing. They then wrote a persuasive essay about a controversial topic after…

Content area teachers are now being tasked with incorporating reading and writing instruction, but what works? In this essential book from Routledge and AMLE, author Lori G. Wilfong describes ten best practices for content area literacy and how to implement them in the middle-level classroom. She also points out practices that should be avoided,…

In a market place crowded with practical rhetoric books what educational value could a challenging work such as Kenneth Burke's "A Rhetoric of Motives" (1950) possibly have? Burke knows but doesn't use the terminology of the classical art and rather than analysing the persuasive rhetoric of well-known speeches to equip us with…

Purpose: The COVID-19 pandemic has affected educational systems worldwide, forcing them to abruptly shift from face-to-face to online teaching and learning. This case study illustrates how a traditional lecture-based activity for undergraduate students in a Management of Health Service Organizations program was transformed into an…

Being a configuration of logically interconnected statements realized in moves and stages, an argumentative essay is built around the notion of textual unity achieved through lexico-grammar and semantic associations. The study attempted to analyze the role of cohesion in the rhetorical structure of undergraduate EFL students. Hence, the 13 moves…

This study explores one teacher's instructional method for teaching life sciences using argumentation and argumentative writing rather than simple templates for writing claims and evidence. The microethnographic discourse analytic case study reported here included the teacher and 26 "advanced" eighth-grade students in a suburban middle…

This essay presents a decade-long reflective account of resisting (in) and appropriating English that I have experienced as a young, female academic from the Middle East who has been engaged in teaching and researching Academic English pedagogy transnationally. Informed by Bakhtin's philosophy of dialogue and his notions of insided-ness,…

Using Toulmin's argumentation theory, we analysed the texts of systematic reviews in the area of workplace health promotion to explore differences in the modes of reasoning embedded in reports of narrative synthesis as compared with reports of meta-analysis. We used framework synthesis, grounded theory and cross-case analysis methods to analyse 85…

Refutational text is one of the many instructional techniques that have been proposed to be used in education as a way to achieve effective learning. The aim of refutational text is to transform misconceptions into conceptions that are in line with current scientific concepts. This is done by explicitly stating a misconception, refuting it, and…

What are grades doing in a homiletics classroom? This article traces the function of grades through the broader history of the educational system in the United States and then makes suggestions for how grades can be used more effectively in teaching preaching. Beginning in the nineteenth century, teachers used grades to rank and motivate students,…

What is the relationship between the language people use to describe an event and their moral judgments? We test the hypothesis that moral judgment and causative verbs rely on the same underlying mental model of people's actions. Experiment 1a finds that participants choose different verbs to describe the major variants of a moral dilemma, the…

Taking Swedish secondary school students as a point of departure, this article focuses on aspects of teaching and learning critical literacy and specifically on what students identify as argumentative text structure. Challenges connected to teaching critical literacies can be considered quite big, since studies show that students have difficulties…