This article describes the ways in which a class of 7- and 8-year-old children used writing to communicate. Using Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics as a theoretical frame, I examine what functions these messages served, how functions varied from child to child and how the practice of message-sending evolved over time. Analysis of data…

The problem of individualization and differentiation of the learning process is still relevant in the education. The Republic of Tatarstan is a special community where many nationalities live together. In this article the problem of the text interpretation at literature lessons is on the focus of view. Leaning on the provisions, provided by…

Academic Literacies and English for Specific Purposes perspectives on the teaching of academic writing tend to be positioned as dichotomous and ideologically incompatible. Nonetheless, recent studies have called for the integration of these two perspectives in the design of writing programmes in order to meet the needs of students in the…

Even though the existence and importance of inner forms of sign-making are acknowledged in social-semiotic educational research, their contours have, none the less, yet to be charted in a systematic way. This article uses a combination of social-semiotic and pragmatist approaches to bring into focus some characteristics of pupils' inner…

Purpose: Few tools are available to examine the narrative speaking ability of adolescents. Hence, the authors designed a new narrative task and sought to determine whether it would elicit a higher level of syntactic complexity than a conversational task in adolescents with typical language development. Method: Forty adolescents (M[subscript age] =…

The critical importance of second language (L2) input, output, and interaction in TESOL notwithstanding, the decision between immersive (L2-English only) versus nonimmersive approaches is considered "the most fundamental question facing second language acquisition (SLA) researchers, language teachers, and policymakers" (Macaro, 2014, p.…

This paper investigates Pakistani doctoral thesis acknowledgements from genre analysis perspective. A corpus of 235 PhD thesis acknowledgements written in English was taken from Pakistani doctoral theses collected from eight different disciplines. HEC Research Repository of Pakistan was used as a data sources. The theses written by Pakistani…

This essay explores the theme of the double in Umberto Eco's "The Island of the Day Before," Joseph Conrad's "The Secret Sharer" and Zivko Chingo's "The Big Water." While traditionally the double is connected with the evil alter-ego of the protagonist, what brings these three works together (by an Italian, English and…

This article explores the relationship between hard science fiction and physics and a gendered culture of science. Empirical studies indicate that science fiction references might spur some students' interest in physics and help develop this interest throughout school, into a university education and even further later inspire the practice of…

Two experiments examine how men and women interpret pronouns in discourse. Adults are known to show a strong "first-mention bias": When two characters are mentioned ("Michael played with William…"), comprehenders tend to interpret subsequent pronouns as coreferential with the first of the two characters and to find pronouns…

This program profile explains and illustrates a pedagogical application of Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS) to a one-semester, upper-division online Professional Writing course. We explain our use of a heuristic, which we liken to "night-vision goggles," that enables students to systematically analyze field data that they gather from a…

Most learners studying English language feel that their educators use irrelevant, uninteresting, and culturally unfamiliar reading materials for teaching reading. As a result, most of them struggle to comprehend the English language texts used by the teachers. Therefore, the aim of this research is to investigate the genre and content preferences…

Literature can be a powerful resource for adolescents' psychosocial development, as it provides opportunities to experience the world through the perspectives of others and juxtapose these with one's own experiences. However, gaining access to these perspectives requires going beyond literal words on the page to explore interpretive meanings. This…

In the multilingual history of England, the period following the Norman Conquest in 1066 is a particularly intriguing phase, but its code-switching patterns have so far received little attention. The present article describes and analyses the multilingual practices evinced in London, British Library, MS Stowe 34, containing one instructional prose…

The authors share findings from a recent study of teens who freely select to read texts typically marginalized by schools (dystopia, vampire, romance, horror, fantasy), revealing the distinct functional and psychological benefits of pleasure reading. The students who participated in the study that the authors report on were eighth graders who…