Background: Many first-year students find the reading of academic texts to be challenging and overwhelming. In particular, first-year students studying sociology at the South African institution where the study was conducted complain of comprehension challenges. This may be due to the presence of numerous theoretical and abstract concepts in…

The benefits of engaging students in mathematics classroom dialogue have been highlighted (and advocated) in a large body of research studies, most of which were conducted in Western cultural contexts. Whether such research advocacy can be extended legitimately to encompass practice in classrooms situated in other cultural contexts, such as East…

The use of collaborative writing partnerships is frequently cited as an effective strategy to increase the productivity and quality of academic writing (Austin & Baldwin, 1991). However, developing and utilizing these relationships effectively can prove challenging to early-career academics. This article used Boud, Keogh, and Walker's (1985)…

A persisting gap in the field of disciplinary literacy is lack of conceptual clarity around the term "discipline." In this theoretical article, the author explains some concerns with existing definitional imprecision and argues that genre-oriented activity theory offers a way to reconceptualize the focus of disciplinary literacy,…

Concept maps can be used in undergraduate biology as ways to visually communicate the relationships among things and events. One strength of concept mapping is that there is not just a single, correct way to compose one, given a list of particular concepts. Nevertheless there seem to be associations among ideas that are expressed frequently while…

In the academic context, plagiarism is usually seen as an ethical offence, the boundaries and definition of which are often unclear. However, in some countries, plagiarism is also a legal wrong, amounting to copyright infringement. This article proposes a test for assessing plagiarism of academic works. The test is based on the law and…

This study at a Canadian university grew out of the need to know whether students acquired academic vocabulary incidentally through text exposure (extensive reading) in class. The ability to explicitly teach all the words on the academic word list is an unreasonable expectation for a one-semester course. This study, therefore, investigated whether…

Taking a cognitive approach to genre-specific language, this corpus-based study investigated the disciplinary and paradigmatic effect on the use of a specific type of attitude markers--surprise markers--with an analytical framework informed by frame semantics. A Surprise frame was generated and then used to analyze the use of surprise markers in a…

Some argue that supporting minoritized students' "academic language" (AL) development fosters equity in education. Others contend that AL is hegemonic, and that attempts to teach it perpetuate inequities across racial, ethnic, social class, immigrant, and related sociocultural and linguistic student differences. In this article, we frame…

Background: Dialogic engagement is instrumental in promoting higher-order thinking, motivation, and learning. Despite their dramatic uptake in the US in the past decade, there is limited evidence that online high school courses offer sufficient opportunities for students to communicate and collaborate with teachers and peers. Objectives: This…

The writing retreat has been positioned as an effective response to the pressure to "publish or perish" in higher education. An academic writing retreat is a professional development event that allows scholars to immerse themselves in writing for publication and to receive on-site support for that writing. In 2012, the Office of Research…

It is important to understand multilingual students' lived experiences and sense-making in their everyday written communication before rethinking the implementation of translingual writing in college composition classrooms. Unpacking multilinguals' written communication across social and academic contexts, this exploratory qualitative study…

This qualitative study explores student learning progression through reflective writing on a tertiary-level course in social work. The study is based on the content analysis of three sets of data: student reflective writing, instructor formative feedback on this writing, and student end-of-course reflections. Our findings demonstrate that…

The choice of language for publishing is a topic of particular significance for scholars of languages other than English (LOTE) due to the importance of publishing in the professional language for maintaining expertise in the written academic register of the respective language. While the multilingual ability of such scholars means they can…

This study examines the use of lexical bundles in reports produced by university-level L2 English writers in civil and environmental engineering (CEE). The corpus consists of 119 reports, and the study compares the use of different types of lexical bundles (3-word, 4-word, and 5-word) in high-scoring and low-scoring papers. The results show that…