Gifted students get bored of reading authoritative and descriptive multimodal texts. They need coherent, explanatory, and interactive texts. Moreover, because of the pandemic, gifted students took courses online, and teachers had to conduct their lessons on digital online tools with multimodal representations. They posted supplementary teaching…

The improvement of writing skills is one of the aims of the educational system. The present study implemented strategy-focused instruction through the Cognitive Self-Regulation Instruction (CSRI) program which included three instructional components: Direct Teaching, Modelling, and Peer-Practice. The aim was to explore the short- and long-term…

The purpose of this study is to analyse how vocabulary depth develops in the early years of primary school and to ascertain the effect it has on the quality of the texts produced by the students. A total of 332 Spanish students from the first to fourth grades participated by doing a synonyms/antonyms task to evaluate their vocabulary depth, along…

There are a number of functions paragraphs play in discourse studies. For example, it encourages a writer to give adequate focus to the various aspects of his or her message; and it facilitates the identification of one idea in an essay to another idea. Some classical second language writers (for example: Stern, 1976; Halliday & Hasan, 1976;…

Is it structure or the selection of knowledge that makes writing historical narrative so difficult? Where does a conceptual focus on change, or causation, come in? James Ellis set out to explore the challenges his Year 9 pupils faced in writing historical narratives about change. Inspired by the work of Orlando Figes, he put together a scheme of…

Open-ended comprehension questions are a common type of assessment used to evaluate how well students understand one of multiple documents. Our aim is to use natural language processing (NLP) to infer the level and type of inferencing within readers' answers to comprehension questions using linguistic and semantic features within their responses.…

This study investigates the relationship between three discourse synthesis skills (i.e., quotation, summarization, and connection) and students' overall integrated writing performance in Chinese, students' first language, and English, their second language. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that 63.6% of the variance in students' overall…

Employing scientific reasoning when giving biological explanations comes easily to the experienced scientist. However, students often encounter difficulty when they attempt to explain biological phenomena. One significant obstacle appears to be the failure or inability to bear in mind the levels of organization. To address this issue, learning…

In this paper we outline the use of a concept mapping narrative method to elicit the complex and interconnected conceptualisations of specialized knowledge (assessment literacy) for a specific cohort of participants (teacher-examiners). In particular, we are interested in exploring how relational concept mapping and narrative interviews can be…

This paper provides a critical reflection on the academic writing ability of English second-language students in a South African university. Acquiring proficiency in academic writing is one of the essential skills that students at the tertiary level are expected to acquire. One challenge that has emerged after the outbreak of COVID-19 is that…

Discourse markers (DMs) are linguistic forms characterized by their use as conversation organizers or pause fillers (Fox Tree, 2010). Although used frequently in both speech and writing, DMs are not often taught in L2 classrooms, despite incorrect usage causing potential misunderstandings (Polat, 2011). Additionally, L2 learners have been observed…

English language arts teacher Zachary Wright describes how he uses "Mad-Lib"-like templates to help his unconfident writers (which is most of his students) see precisely how to do things like write a thesis statement, extract examples from the text, and structure a coherent essay.

The general consensus in second language (L2) acquisition research that instruction facilitates L2 development has been confirmed in a growing number of meta-analyses and research syntheses conducted in an increasingly wide range of L2 areas, including, recently, pronunciation instruction. Yet, little research has been done on the…

The research genre has specific communicative purposes which require students to understand the tone, generic and disciplinary conventions. The present study explored the potential of thematic progression (TP) to contribute to research argument readability. TP concerns how clauses encode information and how that information is carried forward.…

With the incremental integration of technology in writing assessment, technology-generated feedback has found its way to take further steps toward replacing human corrective feedback and rating. Yet, further investigation is deemed necessary regarding its potential use either as a supplement to or replacement for human feedback. This study aims to…