Academic vocabulary is indisputably one of the most important features of academic texts and recent decades have seen the creation of several lists of academic vocabulary intended to provide a pedagogically useful compilation of the most prevalent words used across as well as within various academic disciplines. These academic word lists have…

In terms of their directness and modification strategies, this study investigated how undergraduate speakers of Turkish formulate their naturally occurring requests in an academic context, in which they request things from an academic in his office. After a 4-year data collection period, the researcher analyzed 395 of the requests (hand-recorded…

Project Mathematics and English Language Development (MELD) is a sixth-grade mathematics intervention aimed at supporting English learners' (ELs) development of academic language and mathematical knowledge. This article describes the MELD scaffolds and strategies for ELs with multiple examples, as well as survey and focus group data on the…

The function of academy depends on wide practices of institutionalization. Academy is not only responsible to instruct, but also it has to train generations that will take over its own institutionalism. Academic writing is the foremost tool of academy's own reproduction. The problem of this study is academic writing. Academic writing in Turkish…

Several researchers have claimed that low-achieving students, especially second language students, need explicit academic vocabulary instruction to "catch up" with their age peers (e.g., Nagy & Townsend, 2012). Two possible paths to vocabulary growth -- free reading and explicit vocabulary instruction -- were compared in terms of…

It has been well documented in research that students from so-called 'non-traditional' backgrounds can experience significant difficulty in accessing higher education, in part due to a lack of cultural capital. This is further reinforced by 'invisible pedagogic practices' such as 'critical analysis', 'structure' and 'argument', which uphold the…

The field of citizenship education witnessed an expanding body of literature looking at the case of China. Yet citizenship with broad conceptual terrain often refers to different things in the literature. This paper foregrounds the common core of the essentially contested concept of citizenship and considers citizenship conception as discourse. By…

Metadiscourse, defined as discourse about discourse, has been borrowed from philosophy into applied linguistics and has evolved as a new area of research in this field. Although metadiscourse is a relatively new subfield in applied linguistics, it has been researched by a range of scholars around the world. The current paper reports the findings…

This paper addresses three central themes that run through the contributions to this special issue. The first of these is what it argues to be an inescapable connection between research and what might in some sense be regarded as the pursuit of truth, or at least of beliefs that are more deserving of belief and our confidence than others. Even…

This study explored how a collaborative approach in teaching for disciplinary academic writing would influence the transfer of learning in postgraduate students with varied writing proficiency levels. A sample population of 58 medical students majoring in four different medical sciences participated in this research. Throughout a whole semester,…

This article examines how writer's voice is constructed in argumentative essays written at the pre-university level. The study focusses on the student writers' control over evaluative resources that influence the realization of voice in the high-scoring and low-scoring scripts. Using the APPRAISAL system in Systemic Functional Linguistics, the…

This study examines whether children's decontextualized talk--talk about nonpresent events, explanations, or pretend--at 30 months predicts seventh-grade academic language proficiency (age 12). Academic language (AL) refers to the language of school texts. AL proficiency has been identified as an important predictor of adolescent text…

The standardization of writing styles and formats and the use of jargon in the social sciences have had considerable consequences on the quality of academic work. Due to the emphasis on method, theory, and empirical rigor, creativity, personal narrative, and storytelling no longer play a large role in academic writing. Addressing the growing…

This study presents a case study of academic discourse socialization in a Japanese EFL student in a research seminar course to understand the content of a scholarly book in English. Drawn on theoretical perspectives of language socialization and community of practice, an 8-month case study investigated how the participant was socialized into the…

Although there have been extensive theoretical discussions on the various reading skills needed in academic situations, empirical investigations on this topic are scarce. There is even much less research on the latent structure underlying those skill needs. This study attempts to fill this gap by investigating the perceived factorial structure of…