Recently a novel instrument -- the Core Academic Language Instrument (CALS-I) -- aimed at testing a constellation of school-relevant English language skills was developed and validated for use in the United States (Uccelli, Barr, Dobbs, Galloway, Meneses and Sánchez, 2015. Core Academic Language Skills: An expanded operational construct and a…

Reading can be considered constitutive epistemology for science and a fundamental aspect of scientific literacy. This study attempted to give further insights into the comprehension of different genres of science texts (textbook and popular science) and the assimilation of the academic language by adolescent age students. The writings 14- and…

A defining feature of honors education is meaningful engagement within and across disciplines, yet significant challenges for creating and sustaining meaningful transdisciplinary research remain. One such challenge involves a nuanced understanding of a discipline, or what educational researchers call "disciplinary literacy." This article…

This study examines the relationship between English language proficiency outcomes and the use of a Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) tool that is designed to strengthen the academic English and oral proficiency skills of young English Learners (ELs). We compare scores on a standardized English language proficiency assessment for 2,034…

The current corpus-based study investigated the lexical profile of psychology research articles based on General Service List (GSL) (West, 1953) and Academic Word List (AWL) (Coxhead, 2000). To this end, a corpus of 8,500 psychology research articles with around 74 million words was analyzed. The results showed that the AWL accounted for 13.12% of…

Peer review in the classroom can enhance numerous employability skills such as critical appraisal, writing skills, reflection practices and collaborative experiences. This study takes place over two years and discusses the implementation of a repeating blind peer review cycle across a single semester for final year chemistry students enrolled on a…

When students arrive at university there is an expectation that they come already equipped with the skills they need to read academic texts. In contrast, many students have low confidence in their ability to read challenging texts, often experiencing this as a barrier to engaging with academic practices. Recent research has identified the…

Loss aversion has been shown to influence decision making in a host of social and economic contexts. This paper presents a novel assessment strategy that seeks to address issues of student engagement and academic integrity through the combination of the concepts of loss aversion and peer-assessment. Students faced the possibility of losing a small…

Given the continuing harm that racism produces in the U.S. and the world, as well as the increased interest in anti-racist work, this paper asks: Is the work of the communication center racist? In the absence of an anti-racist praxis in every hire, in every tutoring session, in every workshop, in every training, the short answer is…

Classroom assessment practices can be confusing for many teachers. Terminology is numerous and elusive. Different types of assessment serve different purposes. This short discussion paper's contribution originates from my own attempt to determine whether analytic scales would be more appropriate than holistic scales for assessing the L2 writing…

This study reports on a corpus analysis of the research articles published by Iranians, Chinese, and Turkish authors in the Reading Matrix journal. For this purpose, 62 research articles (373000 words) were meticulously analyzed to determine how the authors project their identities through different types of self-mention practices. Results of the…

Individuals with lower proficiency in a second language tend to produce more disfluent speech patterns in the second language. Speech disfluencies refer to interruptions in the forward flow of speech and are distinct from the colloquial use of "fluency," to characterize knowledge of a language. Prior research indicates that some speech…

In this paper, we present and illustrate four principles used to develop discipline-specific academic language tutorials for students who enter university with low levels of academic language proficiency. The tutorials are part of a university-wide language support program following a post enrolment language assessment (PELA). The principles…

This paper is an overview of key integration challenges facing Chinese students at UK higher education institutions (HEIs). It responds to recent admissions diversification strategies launched by UK institutions as well as increasingly critical narratives surrounding Chinese students. The independently researched report argues that students from…

Research on academic socialization has predominately focused on the L2 educational experiences of international students. While foreign language (FL) research has explored "multiliteracies" and "intercultural learning," literacy in a FL continues to be understood as the use of foreign words and grammar combined with culturally…