Purpose: There are many aspects of words that can influence our lexical processing, and the words we are exposed to influence our opportunities for language and reading development. The purpose of this study is to establish a more comprehensive understanding of the lexical challenges and opportunities students face. Method: We explore the latent…

Dependency distance has increasingly become a key measure of interest in cross-linguistic corpus studies from multiple perspectives. Based on a syntactically annotated corpus of 400 PhD dissertation abstracts written by native English (L1) and English as a foreign language (L2) academic writers, the current study investigated the mean dependency…

I have had some success with academic writing. Yet, even after publishing in journals like the Teachers College Record, I still find myself running into moments of doubt about my voice, the purpose of my writing, and how to make my work have the impact it deserves. I offer this commentary to you - the academic writer (at any career stage) - and…

In this article, the author offers suggestions to assist in taming "The Imposter Monster." What is that? Understanding that while academic writing can often be a daunting prospect for an early career researcher there are strategies that help. Author Marie Stewart writes one of the key strategies that her helped navigate this challenging…

The demand for a creative workforce has never been higher, yet schools struggle to teach and assess creativity among students efficiently. Compositions are an effective way to incorporate creativity across the curriculum; however, essays are time consuming to evaluate for quality or creativity. This study explored (a) if high creativity scores are…

Vocabulary is a prominent contributor to reading comprehension. However, little is known about how students with disabilities with lower vocabulary performance respond to Tier 1 instruction, or how their vocabulary knowledge relates to their content acquisition. To examine the differential impact of Tier 1 instruction for U.S. middle school…

The research process is usually construed as linear, from registration to graduation, defined by completion within a certain period. This notion of a linear 'pipeline' has been critiqued for its embeddedness in a managerial discourse and the way it constrains transformation. Here, we focus on how writing support gets ensnared in 'pipeline…

An important part of college learning is the ability to comprehend complex texts. Research indicates that epistemic beliefs--views about what knowledge is like and how people come to know--may guide readers' goals and behaviors. Metaphor is a tool for uncovering individual's beliefs. This article reports on a study examining 90 beginning…

Performance standards have important consequences for all the stakeholders in the assessment of L2 academic writing. These standards not only describe the level of writing performance but also provide a basis for making evaluative decisions on the academic writing. Such a high-stakes role of the performance standards requires the enhancement of…

This study documents the development of an assessment (a multiple-choice test with free text rationale) built into an academic skills module over a 2 year period. Initially introduced as a credit bearing assessment to promote student engagement, disappointing results in the first year prompted a further intervention in year 2 with an additional…

This study explores the decolonial potential of Chinese bilingual postgraduate students' translanguaging practices in English academic writing. It investigates the ways that students enact translanguaging to delink from monolingual standard English norms and integrate their authentic bilingual voices in the writing process. A case study was…

An emerging body of research suggests that content-rich literacy instruction has the power to expand elementary children's domain-general and domain-specific literacy skills. For content teachers, such as science teachers, explicit instruction in disciplinary-language and literacy practices can support students reading and writing of school-based…

This study examines how multilingual students (11-12 years) negotiate meaning in writing, drawing, and dialogues in science. Students use emotions, reflections, and experiences from areas other than school when given the opportunity to solve an open-ended task in science. Data consists of texts from three multilingual students and excerpts from…

The number of immigrant and international multilingual learners enrolling in postsecondary education is on the rise. With this growth, there remain difficulties in identifying and supporting multilingual learners moving from K-12 to college due to demographic data collection procedures at the postsecondary level. Postsecondary institutions are…

Writing skills are the most difficult language skills for students, especially those students with English as a Second Language (ESL) and as an English Foreign Language (EFL) in various academic institutions. This situation has made most college students fail to write effective academic works. This study assessed the effectiveness of the Editing…