This paper presents the results of a predicative analysis led on comparison and problem-solution texts produced by pupils of the second and third grades of primary school following a set of reading and writing instructional activities. The production of those texts is of a special challenge to the young writers because of the cognitive and…

In contemporary contexts, young people are accustomed to life story; indeed, their lives are saturated with constructions of their stories and those of others, whether created by themselves or their "friends" on social networks. Multimedia outlets convey often detailed stories of more-famous others, whether celebrities or those experiencing…

The texts and classroom activities in this paper are a sample of those used within a unit on "The Battle for Survival". The unit brings classic Australian literary texts together with reportage on contemporary news events, and demonstrates an integrated approaches to the Literacy, Language and Literature strands of the AC:E. The unit…

This research deals with intertextuality in opinion articles on education. Its objectives are to discover types and functions of intertextuality in the articles and to reveal its social practice. The results of the research reveal there are three major types and two major functions of intertextuality in the articles. The type dominantly applied is…

This article highlights aspects of an interdisciplinary (chemistry-applied linguistics) English for Specific Purposes (ESP) course- and materials-development project. The project was aimed at raising genre awareness among chemistry students and faculty, in addition to improving students' disciplinary reading and writing. As part of the project,…

Purpose: Research has shown that university students, particularly non-native speakers of English, encounter difficulties with various academic text-types and often lack the ability to organise the information in a structure considered effective by the discourse community or to use the significant language features of the text-type effectively to…

As the world told becomes the world shown, the texts of the 21st century will require teachers to adopt new skills, strategies, and pedagogical frameworks to support students' transactions with multimodal texts. This shift from a focus on monomodal, print-based texts to a focus on the skills necessary for producing and consuming multimodal texts…

We examined whether inserting spaces between words in Chinese text would help children learn to read new vocabulary. We recorded adults' and 7- to 10-year-old children's eye movements as they read new 2-character words, each embedded in four explanatory sentences (the learning session). Participants were divided into learning subgroups--half read…

Teachers need a deeper understanding of the texts being discussed, in particular the various textual and visual aspects of picturebooks themselves, including the images, written text and design elements, to support how readers made sense of these texts. As teachers become familiar with aspects of literary criticism, art history, visual grammar,…

Writing is a complex process, and this complexity poses particular challenges when researchers and teachers approach the task of analysing young students' writing samples. This paper outlines a program of research undertaken to develop a writing analysis tool. The tool is designed to map shifts over time in the range of skills and competencies…

Research suggests that experts and beginners use qualitatively different writing processes when given the same text to write. Throughout their writing, experts tend to create a network of executive, structural, and content problems that they continually refine and coordinate as they bring the text to fruition. Novices, in contrast, tend to focus…

This article addresses the relationship among theories related to classroom language and literacy events by first examining the researcher's theoretical perspective on discourse and sociocultural theories of learning development. The analytical heuristic for a microethnographic approach using a variety of theoretical tools is discussed and…

Texts are routinely simplified to make them more comprehensible for second language learners. However, the effects of simplification upon the linguistic features of texts remain largely unexplored. Here we examine the effects of one type of text simplification: intuitive text simplification. We use the computational tool, Coh-Metrix, to examine…

We evaluated the narrative and expository writing samples of 12 adolescents with language-learning disabilities (LLD) in Grades 6 to 12 for elements of microstructure (e.g., productivity, grammatical complexity) and macrostructure (genre-specific text structure elements) using an experimental measure. Writing samples were elicited with…

This article presents a case study research with aims to find out which activities, methodological and textual aspects used in a reading strategies course were causing a group of students difficulties when analyzing critically written information. We conducted the study at Universidad de Córdoba (Colombia) with seventh semester students from the…