This study investigates students' essay revising in the context of an intelligent tutoring system called "Writing Pal" (W-Pal), which combines strategy instruction, game-based practice, essay writing practice, and automated formative feedback. We examine how high school students use W-Pal feedback to revise essays in two different…

This longitudinal case study, supplemented by cross-sectional comparisons among five groups of writers with differing backgrounds, investigates how Natsu, a Japanese multilingual writer, developed her L1, L2 (English), and L3 (Chinese) writing competence over two and a half years. To create a comprehensive picture of this multilingual writer, the…

As a growing number of testing programs use integrated writing tasks, more validation research is needed to inform stakeholders about score use and interpretation. The current study investigates the relationship between writing proficiency and discourse features in an integrated reading-writing task. At a Middle Eastern university, 136…

This research suggests that learning biology in an outdoor environment has a positive cognitive and affective impact on 13-15-year-old, Swedish high school pupils. Eighty-five pupils in four classes participated in a quasi-experimental design. Half the pupils, taking a biology course in ecology or diversity of life, had several lessons outdoors…

The views of Jewish education articulated by Rosenzweig in his essays "It is Time" and in "The Opening of the Lehrhaus" are quite different. So different, in fact, that an account of how one mind can produce such different accounts is necessary. Following the lead of a 1950's popular television quiz show, the authors ask "Will the Real Franz…

Writing researchers have suggested that students who are perceived as strong writers (i.e., those who generate texts rated as high quality) demonstrate flexibility in their writing style. While anecdotally this has been a commonly held belief among researchers and educators, there is little empirical research to support this claim. This study…

Educators advocate that science education can help the development of more responsible worldviews when students learn not only scientific concepts, but also about science, or "nature of science". Cosmology can help the formation of worldviews because this topic is embedded in socio-cultural and religious issues. Indeed, during the Cold…

This paper reports on efforts by three Australian academics to develop students' sociocultural awareness (in particular, their racial literacy) during a time of mounting pressure on teacher educators to narrow and standardise their approaches. The field of health education provides a vehicle for research; however, it is not the paper's central…

Discourse connectives (DCs) are multi-functional devices used to connect discourse segments and fulfill interpersonal levels of discourse. This study investigates the use of selected 80 DCs within 11 categories in the argumentative essays produced by L1 and L2 university students. The analysis is based on the International Corpus Network of Asian…

While thinking critically is often perceived to be the primary purpose of reading, the question of whether it can actually be taught in classrooms has been extensively debated. This paper bases itself on a qualitative case study of university students completing a degree in English Language and Literature. It explores the way in which critical…

Writing researchers have suggested that students who are perceived as strong writers (i.e., those who generate texts rated as high quality) demonstrate flexibility in their writing style. While anecdotally this has been a commonly held belief among researchers and educators, there is little empirical research to support this claim. This study…

Is learning about culture important when learning a foreign language? One would think that after its long history in the field of foreign language teaching this question had been answered with a resounding "yes". However, I saw little evidence of this in the classroom when I returned to the university to learn a foreign language or when…

This study reports on the results of classroom research investigating the effects of corpus use in the process of revising compositions in English as a foreign language. Our primary aim was to investigate the relationship between the information extracted from corpus data and how that information actually helped in revising different types of…

This article examines gender representations of family and parental roles among young people aged 11 to 14 years. It is based on the qualitative analysis of 792 essays written by Portuguese girls and boys attending compulsory education. The adolescents' texts express normative images and cultural representations about gender that are plural and…

Providing feedback on draft essays is an accepted means of enacting a social-constructivist approach to assessment, aligning with current views on the value of formative feedback and assessment for learning (AFL). However, the use of this process as a means of improving not only content but also students' academic writing skills has not been…