As students proceed through school, they are expected to comprehend complex texts but may not have the necessary competencies to do so. This study examined the impact of teaching text organization of lengthy social studies textbook passages on student comprehension of the content contained there. Over a 10-week period, 205 sixth-grade students…

For linguistically diverse students, the path to college is often defined by language. Depending on assessments and institutional policies, students may be placed into course sequences in developmental English, adult basic education, and/or English as a Second Language courses. The purpose of this study was to better understand developmental…

This paper reenvisions academic language learning in the university from a dialogic authorial perspective inspired by the work of Bakhtin. I argue that language pedagogues have misappropriated the radical alternative Bakhtin poses for language learning in his critique of genre through adopting a Vygotskyian internalization approach to discourse…

Prioritizing vocabulary for instruction is central to English for academic purposes (EAP) research. Several word lists have been created to serve different needs, with many of them being restricted to a basic classification as general, academic, and technical words. Although discipline-specific vocabulary lists are useful for particular…

Research into academic writing has, in large part, focused on the fundamentals of how to write, and as a result, the understanding that writers require a space in which to concentrate on writing is not new. What is lacking, however, is detailed consideration of what influences writing practice and, specifically, an understanding of how scholarly…

The last teaching-learning stage in the education system is the doctoral programmes, which turn graduate students into researchers. This evolution involves writing a dissertation, but also being able to discuss research. However, training on spoken genres has not received much attention, and the interest has been mainly on monologic prepared…

Some researchers have argued that low-achieving students may never acquire sufficient levels of academic vocabulary to be successful in school without some form of explicit vocabulary instruction (e.g. Snow, Lawrence, & White, 2009). In this paper, I summarize the available data on the efficiency, in words learned per minute of instruction, of…

This mixed-methods study examined academic oral communication difficulties encountered by Yemeni postgraduate students in a Malaysian public university and how they overcome these difficulties. The study also examined the correlation between students' academic oral communication difficulties and their prior learning experience. Questionnaires,…

This article explores facilitating meaningful mathematics discourse, one of the research-based practices described in "Principles to Actions: Ensuring Mathematical Success for All." Two tools that can support teachers in strengthening their classroom discourse are discussed in this, another installment in the series.

This case study investigated the self-regulated learning strategies that university students employ while engaging with Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) as part of an English for Academic Purposes (EAP) course. Self-Regulated Learning (SRL) involves the processes whereby students plan, monitor, evaluate, and adjust their performance towards…

This dissertation explores three novice nonnative English-speaking doctoral students' experiences with academic speaking and writing practices and speaking-writing connections during their first year of doctoral study in the language education program at a Research One university in the U.S. By adopting the sociocognitve theoretical framework…

An important component of academic writing in English is the word combinations or collocations writers use while expressing meaning and performing various rhetorical functions. It is essential for second language (L2) writers to gain command of these lexico-grammatical combinations (Cortes, 2004; Hyland, 2008a, 2008b) as they develop their L2…

VocQGen is an automated tool designed to generate multiple-choice cloze (MCC) questions for vocabulary assessment in second language learning contexts. It leverages several natural language processing (NLP) tools and OpenAI's GPT-4 model to produce MCC items quickly from user-specified word lists. To evaluate its effectiveness, we used the first…

Following Swales' (1990) influential study on research article (RA) introductions, some attention has increasingly been paid to other rhetorical units of both expert and learners' writing, including titles. A key and effective discursive means through which titles are constructed and presented is the syntactic configuration. The present study,…

In British Columbia's K-12 schools, five years of funded English Language Learning support is frequently not enough to help English language learners fully develop their English language proficiency. This critical analysis examines the literature on metacognition and language learning to find practical metacognitive instructional features to equip…