The full text of the speech given by President Barack Hussein Obama in Chicago after he won a second term in office as US President has been broken into its minimal communicative speech acts. This strategy has been used to analyse and understand how the whole speech is consistent with the cooperative maxims of Quality, Quantity, Relation and…

Modern educational methods emphasize the necessity to transfer knowledge instead of data or information within the educational process. Thus it is important to the educational texts supporting the educational process contain knowledge in a particular textual representation. But it is not trivial to decide whether the particular piece of text…

Chloe Bateman recognised the value to her Key Stage 3 pupils of developing rich subject knowledge, but wanted to find a way of encouraging them to value that knowledge for themselves. In this article she explains how she provided that inspiration by setting her Year 7 class the challenge of writing convincing and engaging historical fiction set in…

The purpose of the present paper is to offer a state-of-the-art review on the topic of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and its theoretical and practical implications on the field of language education. SFL has been widely recognized due to its potentiality to encourage both reflection and action for the participants involved, becoming over…

Accumulating evidence suggests that literacy acquisition involves developing sensitivity to the statistical regularities of the textual environment. To organize accumulating evidence and help guide future inquiry, this article integrates data from disparate fields of study and formalizes a new two-process framework for developing sensitivity to…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to reflect on pedagogical strategies which support the teaching of critical analysis of visual and multimodal texts in a tertiary-level course for Arts students. Design/methodology/approach: The paper describes strategies which focus on developing students' abilities to express interpretive critique, as…

Julian of Norwich (1342-1416), was a Christian mystic whose writings, "Revelation of Love" and "A Book of Showings," are the earliest surviving texts in the English language written by a woman. The question that has puzzled scholars for centuries follows: How could a woman of her time express her vision in such innovative and…

We introduce a special issue featuring four theoretical models of multiple text comprehension. We present a central framework for conceptualizing the four models in this special issue. Specifically, we chart the models according to how they consider learner, texts, task, and context factors in explaining multiple text comprehension. In addition,…

The continuation task, a new form of reading-writing integrated task in which test-takers read an incomplete story and then write the continuation and ending of the story, has been increasingly used in writing assessment, especially in China. However, language-test developers' understanding of the effects of important task-related factors on…

The Interface Hypothesis (Sorace, 2000) developed in line with the Minimalist theory of grammar (Chomsky, 1995 et seq.) supports the view of L2 acquisition that syntactic properties are acquired early while the acquisition of interface properties is delayed. One of the interface properties is inflectional morphology on English verbs, which…

Reading critically involves examining the language choices authors make to "get the job done" -- in other words, to communicate effectively in specific ways with particular audiences. Not all students in middle and high school intuit this type of reading and may experience challenges when they go to write for academic purposes. Their…

This study aimed to profile the sublexical, lexical, and text level language skills, and cognitive processes of a sub-group of children with poor reading comprehension known as poor comprehenders. An assessment protocol was developed to assess each of the components from Perfetti and Stafura's Reading Systems Framework. A comprehensive profile was…

Schema is one of the most common terms used for classifying and constructing knowledge. Therefore, a schema is a pre-planned set of concepts. It usually contains social information and is used to represent chain of events, perceptions, situations, relationships and even objects. For example, Kant initially defines the idea of schema as some…

Acknowledgement appears at the forefront of the high-stakes academic genre of thesis/dissertation writing. Previous research shows the generic structure of acknowledgements written by native Persian postgraduate students contains a 'thanking-God move', absent in native English speakers' acknowledgements. In an approximate replication of Hyland's…

In argument diagrams, perceptual cues are important to aid understanding. However, we do not know what perceptual cues are used and produced to aid understanding. We present two studies in which we investigate (1) which spatial, graphical and textual elements people spontaneously use in creating for-against argument diagrams, and (2) how people…