During the past several years, middle schools and high schools have been shifting their attention to disciplinary literacy. The Common Core State Standards are explicit in requiring teachers to teach the literacy of science, literature, and history, and even states that are not part of Common Core (such as Texas) are making this shift as well.…

This article discusses the various labels and definitions given for texts used for informational reading and writing and the confusion caused by the inconsistency of terms. An EBSCO search on articles published from 2006 to 2011 in the three largest literacy-related professional organizations' journals produced a total of 59 articles.…

As an often recommended but under-utilized pedagogical strategy, writing in mathematics has many benefits for students. However, creating and grading worthwhile writing projects can be more time-consuming than utilizing more traditional forms of assessment. This paper provides a concrete example of a writing project prompt, questions, directions,…

History of math courses are commonly offered in mathematics departments. Such courses naturally lend themselves to writing assignments, and a growing body of research supports writing as a means to learn mathematics. This article details two such assignments, providing an overview of the course in which they are situated, and a student-led…

This is a corpus-based study of a key aspect of academic writing in one discipline (biology) by final-year undergraduates and first-, second-, and third-year graduate students. The papers come from the Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers, a freely available electronic database. The principal aim of the study is to examine the extent of…

This article describes how one urban elementary school's professional development workshop on technology helped teachers grow in their knowledge and practice of a digital reading and writing workshop model. Created in partnership with university faculty, school administration, and elementary teachers, this whole-school professional development…

The aim of this study is to develop and validate environmental song-based materials using a scientific approach which follow the stages of research and development. The writer created environmental lyrics and put them on traditional melodies that are familiar to the students. The materials were tried out using preliminary field test, main field…

Background/Context: Current research addresses the marginalization of social studies and trends in teaching English learners (ELs) in monolingual schools; however, few studies have examined the way in which support services provided to ELs impact their exposure to social studies instruction. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study:…

The present study examined how undergraduate students from a prestigious Chinese university perceived the teaching and learning of English for general academic purposes (EGAP) reading and writing courses. Analyses of 951 questionnaires revealed that most participants generally (strongly) believed that learning general academic English was closely…

Prior studies indicate that vocational students' literacy practices are more demanding than is generally recognised. Employing a view of literacy acquisition as socialisation, we investigated the literacy practices of trades training in Carpentry and Automotive Technology, by interviewing tutors and examined course books and student writing. A…

Every teacher knows the challenge of trying to engage reluctant readers and struggling writers--students whose typical response to a writing prompt is a few sentence fragments scribbled on a sheet of paper followed by an elaborate shrug of the shoulders. The best way to engage less confident readers and writers is to give them something powerful…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to investigate the prospective teachers' ability to write context-based problems about the concepts in radioactivity unit. Methodology: The study is carried out in a university in Turkey with 21 prospective teachers in physics, chemistry and biology in 2014-2015 fall terms. In the study, data are collected…

Communication has long been emphasized in standards-based instruction (NCTM 1991; 2000), yet little distinction has been made between oral and written forms. Nonetheless, both the mathematics and the English language arts Common Core State Standards (CCSS) documents continue to hint at the importance of writing mathematically (CCSSI 2010). The…

Several researchers emphasize the role of the writer's topic knowledge for writing. In academic writing topic knowledge is often constructed by studying source texts. One possibility to support that essential phase of the writing process is to provide interactive learning questions which facilitate the construction of an adequate situation…

We describe a case study that was created to intertwine the fields of biology and mathematics. This project is given in an elementary probability and statistics course for non-math majors. Some goals of this case study include: to expose students to biology in a math course, to apply probability to real-life situations, and to display how far a…