Lexical richness makes an important contribution to L2 writing quality. To explore its importance, the study aims to identify and explain how lexical richness manifests in argumentative essays written in the final exam of reading and writing class by thirty-five undergraduates. The lexical richness consists of four interrelated elements: lexical…

Today's society has valued entrepreneurship in various sectors of personal and professional life, but the school seems to forget this reality. Aware of this fact, the Portuguese Ministry of Education has created a program, from early childhood education to basic and secondary education, to develop the concept of social entrepreneurship in schools.…

This paper describes HASbot, an automated text scoring and real-time feedback system designed to support student revision of scientific arguments. Students submit open-ended text responses to explain how their data support claims and how the limitations of their data affect the uncertainty of their explanations. HASbot automatically scores these…

Recent reform efforts in science education include a focus on science practices. Teachers require support in integrating these practices into instruction. Multimedia educative curriculum materials (MECMs), digital materials explicitly designed to support teacher learning, offer one potential resource for this critical need. Consequently, the…

The implementation of interactive courseware within a task-based learning (TBL) approach was conducted for English Writing for Business to Chinese students in an applied foreign languages department housed in a university of technology. The development of the interactive courseware is based on Mayer's multimedia learning theory, which allows…

Negotiating membership within a disciplinary community is as much an exercise in rhetorical facility as it is content expertise. Where individuals reside in the hierarchy of membership is determined by not only what they talk and write about, but how. Yet, there are many factors that can impact newcomers' acculturation into a disciplinary…

Academic writing is not a lifeless communicative endeavor. It is an interactive process where both writers and readers negotiate meanings in many complex ways. In the case of persuasive essays, students should venture to manifest stance and identity rather than just write to transport ideas. This paper looked into this important aspect of academic…

In this paper I provide a critical commentary of Elmer Thiessen's "The Ethics of Evangelism". Following an overview of the book's project and strategies, I discuss two stages of the project in detail. The first is Thiessen's analysis of "religious proselytism"; the second is Thiessen's arguments that…

The present study attempts to give an account of how students represent writing task in an EAP course. Further, the study is intended to discover if learners' mental representation of writing would contribute to their written performance. During a 16-week term, students were instructed to practice writing as a problem solving activity. At almost…

This study examines the use of peer review in an undergraduate ecology programme, in which students write a research proposal as a grant application, prior to carrying out the research project. Using a theoretical feedback model, we compared teacher and student peer reviews in a double blind exercise, and show how students responded to feedback…

This study examined how student perceptions of math/statistics instructors' argumentativeness and verbal aggressiveness are related to student perceptions of classroom communication climate, student state motivation, and student math anxiety. A total of 216 completed questionnaires were returned by the student participants (96 males and 120…

Background: Within the wider education industry, a large quantity of ideas, practices and products are routinely promoted as useful innovations. These innovations span many forms such as software applications, open source courseware, online learning platforms and web 2.0 technologies. Coupled with this promotion, there is increasing interest and…

The purpose of this exploratory study was to identify the analytic frames children (ages 9 to 11) employed as they worked together to make sense of an ill-structured problem, what those same children did when their frames collided in the context of deliberative dialogue, and what they learned from the process of negotiation. Data included pre- and…

Project teams are a mainstay in both organizations and business schools. Despite their popularity, instructors and students often express dissatisfaction regarding assigned student team projects. In this article, we examine the effects of influence tactics available to instructors (collaborative assistance and rational persuasion) and individual…

Given that grammatical and spelling errors have been found to influence perceived competence and credibility in written communication, this study examined how a student's grammar and spelling errors affect how other students respond to the student's postings in four online debates hosted in asynchronous threaded discussions. Message-response…