This paper presents a case study about the use of digital comics in teaching modern Greek in high schools (aged 12-13). The ultimate goal of the educational use of digital comics is to promote students' acquisition of language skills and to help them apply their imaginations and reuse their cultural experiences in creating multimodal comic-like…

This article outlines how a theory of narrative can be used to deconstruct qualitative research texts. Although research texts are a distinct genre in comparison with works of fiction, the basic components of literary activity are similar. Researchers structure and emphasize data and participants in various ways to tell a logical story. Narrative…

Two fourth-grade teachers presented the idea of using the author's art class to inspire the students to write creatively. The theme of scary stories needed an art project to match. The author immediately had a favorite lesson in mind. By putting a small twist on one of her standard "Frank Lloyd Wright House" projects, scary plans began to take…

Creative Writing (CW) courses and degrees are growing in numbers and influence. They are fashionable for students to enrol on, fashionable for institutions to offer. CW courses have an established track record in producing successful novelists, bring new challenges in reconciling creativity and conformity, and provide a useful source of employment…

It is important to find the means by which struggling writers can find success in the English Language Arts. For students struggling with reading and writing, the visual arts may be a way of accessing and expressing their ideas and ultimately opening up a world of creative possibilities. This article explores drawing and painting as a pre-writing…

How do you show students that revision is more than a classroom exercise to please the teacher? Take them into the real world of writing for publication. In Real Revision, award-winning author and teacher Kate Messner demystifies the revision process for teachers and students alike and provides tried-and-true revision strategies, field tested by…

This paper presents the background, purpose and components of a creative writing course conducted in the Department of English at Sun Yat-sen University as part of the reform in the teaching of English in China. It explains and demonstrates the different components of the course and argues, drawing on evidence from students' work and reflections,…

This article describes the use of "4MALITY", a web-based mathematics tutoring system, with 125 Massachusetts fourth graders and their teachers in three rural school districts during the 2007-2008 school year. At the outset, "4MALITY" was envisioned as a stand-alone web based system providing tutorial support to individual…

As the knowledge that students have to learn becomes more specialized and complex in secondary schools, the language that constructs such knowledge also becomes more technical, dense, abstract, and complex, patterning in ways that enable content experts to engage in specialized social and semiotic practices. In order to effectively engage with the…

This dissertation critically examines mental illness discourses through the intersecting disciplinary lenses of art education and disability studies. Research from multiple disciplines is compared and theorized to uncover the ways in which discourses, or language systems, have oppressively constructed and represented "mental illness." To establish…

In much of the literature on the exploitation of corpora for language learning, the learners are viewed as researchers, who formulate and test their own hypotheses about language use. Having identified difficulties encountered in corpus investigations by our intermediate-level students of Italian in a previous study, we have designed a…

In this paper we report on one aspect of a qualitative study about an online wiki community, which was developed to build collaborative knowledge about poetry among a group of pre-service English teachers. Our paper explores pre-service teachers' experiences of writing in a digital medium and their perceptions of themselves as writers. We focus…

Personal epistemological beliefs, or beliefs about knowing, provide a way in which to understand learning in a range of educational contexts because they are considered to act as filters for all other knowledge and beliefs. In particular, they provide a useful framework for investigating learning and teaching for first year students in tertiary…

Not all of crime writer Ian Rankin's inspiration comes from Edinburgh's mean streets. When it came to writing a Quick Read--one of the short, fast-paced books for reluctant, returning or emergent readers--the Beach Boys provided the unlikely germ for an idea. Despite his success and obvious delight and energy for writing, Rankin admits to being a…

This article presents a pedagogical experience that addresses the use of an instructional strategy called screenwriting aimed at improving the teaching of writing in an educational context. This pedagogical intervention took place in a private English language school, where three adult students willingly participated to create their own short…