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The field of language instruction is crucial in Canada, given the number of newcomers seeking to improve their English (or French) language skills after arrival. For those who plan to enter post-secondary education but do not meet required language proficiency scores, English for Academic Purposes (EAP) programs provide opportunities to strengthen linguistic and academic skills. These inarguably pragmatic goals are often unquestioned, yet EAP instruction is an ideological undertaking with social, economic, and political consequences. This qualitative study investigates language ideologies – rationalizations and justifications for language use and form – through interviews with EAP writing instructors. As participants discussed the material they taught, the language skills students developed, and the consequences of studying EAP writing, ideologies regarding what forms of language should be taught, the purposes of academic writing (instruction), and the social and political dimensions of language were (re)produced and resisted. Formative influences on these ideologies included education, upbringing, and personal language learning experiences. Developing a critical awareness of the understandings of language that inform teaching and learning can make more transparent the linguistic and social discourses that circulate within and beyond EAP writing classrooms and help instructors, students, and other EAP community members (re)produce or resist them strategically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mid-adolescence has been identified as a period of considerable potential growth in the language skills and practices that support reading and writing at school, but little research has examined mid-adolescents' use of connectives in school-relevant persuasive writing. In this study, we define connectives as cohesive devices that signal to a reader logical relations between ideas or organizational relations in a text. Drawing from Halliday and Matthiesen (Halliday's introduction to functional grammar, Routledge, 2014) and Hyland (Metadiscourse: exploring interaction in writing, Continuum, 2005), we propose a comprehensive taxonomy of connectives that guided our examination of developmental trends and individual differences in the use of connectives in persuasive essays written by a socioeconomically and ethnically diverse cross-sectional sample of U.S. public-school mid-adolescents in grades 5 to 8 (N = 512). Our analysis revealed (1) developmental trends and individual differences at different grade levels and (2) identified students' connective use as a predictor of overall writing quality above and beyond students' receptive language skills and sociodemographic factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The communicative approach moved linguistic interaction into the focus of foreign language teaching. In this context, oral communication was and remains the main conceptual focus. However, the usefulness of this emphasis is questionable for the development of written language. Following a theoretical discussion, I carry out an exemplary, critical analysis of writing tasks in new German as a foreign language (DaF) textbooks and argue for a reconsideration of goals for writing instruction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Didacticae: Revista de Investigación en Didácticas Específicas is the property of Didacticae: Revista de Investigacion en Didacticas Especificas and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Anchored in the New Literacy Studies and also based on an ethnographic research, Lea and Street (2014) established three models that allow the study of reading and writing practices at the university: i) that of skills, ii) that of socialization and iii) that of academic literacy as a social practice. Taking this proposal into account, the objective of this investigation is to identify and analyze if and how these three perspectives on academic literacy appear in the scope of the discipline Portuguese Language Workshop: Reading and Text Production (OLP), offered at a distance and every six months, for more than a decade at UFMG (Federal University of Minas Gerais). This is a study with a qualitative approach (Paiva, 2019), motivated by professional experience as tutors of the course. Based on the syllabus of the discipline, the instructional and informative materials, the resources available and the tasks requested, we found that the first two models mentioned underlie the class. With regard to skills, linguistic aspects are explored individually, based on the demands made explicit by undergraduates in the texts produced. This, however, does not happen without contextualization, but in articulation with academic socialization and the language in use, since the texts read and written are always explored as statements inscribed in discursive genres (Bakhtin, 1997). On the other hand, the third model, which emphasizes the construction of meanings by subjects and the power and identity relations inherent to the university sphere, is little adopted, especially when considering that the class encompasses a large number of students per semester. This fact is a challenge, because it homogenizes literate practices and restricts them to the course itself in the expectation that the students will be able, later, to (re)produce them and (re)adjust them to contexts in which they participate at the university. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the integration of social justice-oriented content into English for Academic Purposes (EAP) instruction at a four-year university on the East coast of the United States. In the context of an Academic Writing course taught to emergent bilingual (EB) students, this article identifies the challenges and prospects of utilizing material that addresses past and present racial inequities in the United States— particularly when it comes to equipping EBs with essential background knowledge to engage in meaningful dialogues and critical writing about social issues that are entrenched in white supremacist and settler colonialist histories. It makes suggestions for TESOL educators who seek to adopt more equitable and inclusive teaching practices by leaning into rather than away from challenging classroom conversations with EB students and embracing the intersecting challenges and opportunities for new learning that may arise. • Social justice-oriented materials teach both language and content in EAP settings. • Language learners are emergent bilinguals (EB); revised terminology is explained. • EB students identified connections between present and past injustices. • EB students adopted activist stances in class and participated in community events. • Social justice-oriented curricula can serve efforts to decolonize TESOL. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the nature of metalinguistic awareness in first-year college writers enrolled in two-year degree programs, corequisite support courses, or both. Metalinguistic awareness is an ability to systematize knowledge about language and use that knowledge to monitor language as language. Participants in the study completed reading journals in which they were asked to articulate observations about language used in academic texts. Analysis of responses suggests the students in the study are more likely to address word choice and tone than syntax when attending to the language of a text. Despite relative lack of syntactic metalanguage in student responses, there is evidence of developing metalinguistic awareness. Results suggest a need for research in grammatical concept formation and pedagogy for first-year composition and integrated reading and writing instruction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores disciplinary literacy instruction integrated within an elementary engineering unit in an urban classroom. A multidisciplinary team of university literacy and engineering educators and classroom teachers served as the research team for this case study. A social semiotic language theory (systemic functional linguistics) and a framework of mechanistic reasoning informed the instruction and analysis of classroom discourse and student writing. The study illustrates how a flexible set of disciplinary language choices functioned to support students' evolving reasoning as part of the engineering design process. These findings provide insights into synergy between language and reasoning as a habit of design. These findings also inform calls to align science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) literacy and core disciplinary practices within both Common Core State Standards for (English language arts) ELA and Next Generation Science Standards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is generally considered that students who want to become scientists engage in scientific practices as university students, particularly when pursuing postgraduate studies. However, schools and teachers can help students participate in authentic scientific and disciplinary practices, such as data sampling and analysis, in high school. The authors explore the case of a Mexican high school student whose experience in becoming a published scientific author was afforded through the synergy of different factors, such as a specific school's curriculum, a teacher's pedagogy based on his real experience as a scientist, and an institutional context that favors scientific endeavors. The findings are discussed based on Moje's framework of common disciplinary practices and Knorr‐Cetina's definition of habitual and epistemic practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Learning to use language in order to complete source-based writing tasks is a challenge for middle grade writers worthy of additional study, especially given that these tasks are increasingly common in classrooms. Here, we examined the contribution of receptive and productive cross-disciplinary academic language skills to the writing quality of middle graders' science summaries, after accounting for students' sociodemographic characteristics, their comprehension of the science source text, and general summary features (i.e., length and copy ratio). Our results suggest that the ability to produce a high-quality science summary is predominately driven by the writers' receptive academic language proficiency, comprehension of the source text and productive academic language used when writing, including text length. We contend that these results are illuminating because of the joint examination of students' productive and receptive academic language skills. In addition, this study attempts to unpack the relation between summary length and quality, identifying levels of receptive academic language skills as an important moderator. These findings have the potential to advance the current understanding of malleable factors associated with science writing proficiency, as well as with those associated with source-based writing more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A project to invite experts in various disciplines to converse with literacy professors and teachers with over 30 participants resulted in several insights about disciplinary literacy and student learning in the disciplines and professions. The authors suggest that such conversations or partnerships strengthen student learning for college, career, and civic life. The authors differentiate between professions and disciplines, highlighting how informed citizenship is an important outcome of teaching the literacies of the disciplines. The authors explore the purposes of communication within and between the disciplines. Insights and recommendations are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This department explores how teachers can sustain students' multilingual literacies and reimagine literacy learning across multiple contexts in conversation with researchers, practitioners, and communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

English Language Learners (ELLs) are often deprived of using English for academic purposes in meaningful and authentic contexts when pulled out of the classroom for English Language Development services. To tackle this issue, schools have increasingly integrated ELLs in the mainstream classroom through an inclusive model of co-teaching between one content and one language teacher. Through a case study approach, we explored two co-teachers' practices that fostered writing development within one first grade linguistically diverse mainstream classroom. Through analysis of classroom interaction as well as teachers' and researchers' notes, findings revealed that in holding core shared practices, the two teachers achieved an enhanced ability to scaffold their teaching to support their students' writing development. Core shared practices included a sensitive view of students' academic language and writing development, modeling for conversations about writing, embedding specific scaffolds for academic language, and opportunities for talking and sharing ideas about writing. These core practices enabled the ESOL and content teacher to take up and share equal and complementing roles during planning, instruction, and assessment. Co-teaching can yield positive results provided that the ESOL teacher has a central, not peripheral role in the mainstream classroom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Adab Al-Basrah is the property of Republic of Iraq Ministry of Higher Education & Scientific Research (MOHESR) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This department focuses on literacy leaders, including school and instructional leaders, teachers, and external partners, who are working to improve outcomes for adolescent and adult learners in a wide range of education settings. Columns investigate the challenges and complexities inherent in such work and share lessons learned, impactful strategies and approaches, and promising pathways forward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholarship in literacy and education has depicted reading as an active, multidimensional, and complex process. However, an often more reductive version of reading, close reading, has been advocated frequently for use in secondary and postsecondary literacy classrooms. The author examines materials created to help teachers implement close reading strategies to demonstrate the New Critical assumptions that undergird some close reading pedagogies. The author ends by recommending genre analysis as a way for educators to broaden students' conceptions of reading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To assess text comprehension and concept mastery, standards-aligned measures have moved from using multiple-choice questions to using source-based writing tasks (sometimes referred to as Reading-to-Write tasks). For example, it is now common for students to be asked to read a text and then to produce a written response, often a summary or argumentative essay. While this task involves comprehension of the source text, it remains unclear the degree to which these reading-to-write tasks also tap additional skills, such as academic language proficiency, which may support or hamper the writer's ability to convey information acquired from reading. Given the lack of research focused on this question, in this study, we examined whether variability in early adolescents' Core Academic Language Skills (CALS) contributes to the quality of their written summaries of science source texts. A total of 259 participants in grades four to eight were administered the Core Academic Language Skills Instrument (CALS-I) and the Global Integrated Scenario-Based Assessment (GISA), which included a reading comprehension test and a summary writing task, both based on the same scientific source text. Findings revealed that CALS, previously shown to be associated with reading comprehension, have a robust positive relation with early adolescents' science summary writing quality, predicting unique variance over and above students' source text comprehension and demographic characteristics. Results highlight the relevance of paying instructional attention not only to content but also to language skills when preparing students to become independent learners in a content area. In addition, these findings offer some evidence for CALS as a cross-modality construct relevant to both reading and writing at school. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors culled evidence-based recommendations and guidelines for effective instruction from practice guides and national studies addressing the development of academic language in English Language Learners (ELLs). Working within the framework of the qualitative similarity hypothesis (Paul, Wang, & Williams, 2013), the authors used the evidence base from the ELL literature as a starting point for researching similar findings with d/Deaf students. The etic areas of academic talk, reading comprehension, vocabulary, writing, technology, teacher training, sheltered instruction, and small-group instruction are discussed. Given the parallels in findings (despite the lack of studies in d/Deaf education that meet the design standards for scientifically evidence-based research) between research with d/Deaf students and research with ELLs, the authors, like others in d/Deaf education, suggest that the field should employ the findings from the ELL research to nurture the use of academic language by d/Deaf students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors featured in this department column share instructional practices that support transformative literacy teaching and disrupt "struggling reader" and "struggling writer" labels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors examined how high school seniors conceptualized the task of writing college admissions essays, the audience for that writing, and themselves as potentially college‐worthy writers. In a survey and related interviews, students revealed more emphasis on generic good writing than on the narrative argument genre that college admissions personnel often privilege. Students who wrote to address a specific college admissions audience varied considerably in how they conceptualized this set of readers, and many students did not write with a particular audience in mind. Students who emphasized the pivotal role of writing quality were often equivocal about their chances of being convincing. These findings suggest that teachers should help students learn about the narrative argument genre, build students' familiarity with admissions readers as audiences, and support students' sense of self‐efficacy in academic writing. Recommendations for reshaping college admissions are also included. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• STT can be an accessible alternative mode of composition and may be especially useful for students with writing-related LDs. • STT helps some students use everyday speech practices to work quickly, write more, and allay concerns about writing errors. • Students may be more likely to use STT if they feel their voices are welcomed in class. • STT may hinder student thinking and writing when it inaccurately transcribes non-standard accents. Speech to text (STT) technology, also called voice recognition or speech recognition technology, automatically transcribes users' speech to a computer screen. Research indicates that STT shows promise as an alternative mode of composition, supporting students in making fewer errors, writing more, and writing better. Much of this research takes place in elementary and middle schools, often focusing on students with identified learning disabilities. The current study extends STT research into general education high school classrooms, where students (N = 120) were invited to use it as much or as little as they wanted during one school year. We asked: Who used STT? Did subgroups, such as students labeled with learning disabilities, differ in their choices? When students chose to use STT, what kinds of writing did they do? Did STT compositions differ from non-STT compositions? Finally, what were students' and teachers' perceptions of STT? We analyzed field notes, interviews, surveys, and student writing with and without STT, and found mixed results: On average, students wrote more when they used STT than not. A little more than half of students found that STT eased the cognitive load of composition. A little less than half of students found that the tool constrained their composition. Some were put off by technical problems or embarrassment attendant with speaking out loud in class. Students' choices to use STT correlated with special education designation, but not other designations. Despite students' mixed reports, teachers were consistently positive about STT and planned to use it in future classes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Often coauthored by university‐ and school‐based educators, preservice teachers, and youths, this department column considers how literacies are best developed through context‐crossing partnerships among university, school, and community constituents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents data from a collection of yearlong case studies on resident multilingual writers' college admissions essays. The focal student in this piece revealed the challenges that such writers face in presenting themselves to college admissions officers. Exploring these cultural and linguistic conflicts, this analysis uses Goffman's performance theories, which argue that writers (re)construct identities in response to changing social cues. Literacy educators, researchers, and policymakers can use these insights to help resident multilingual writers balance the demands of academic audiences with their preferred forms of representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This qualitative study offers critical insight into how language policy interacts with daily classroom decisions at a large and highly diverse urban community college in the United States. Specifically, it examines the challenges that faculty teaching developmental writing courses for English language learners experience when determining what constitutes academic literacy and what language dimensions should be taught when their students’ success is solely based on the results of a summative, high-stakes assessment of expository writing. To identify these challenges and analyze how teachers negotiate their curricular decisions and classroom practices, this study includes interviews with ten writing instructors regarding reading choices, writing assignments, syllabus construction, and pedagogical methodologies in order to ascertain descriptive theories of academic literacy knowledge. This study of micro-language planning demonstrates that how university writing instructors define academic literacy and translate this construct into classroom policies and practices does not always align with university language policy, and offers a broader understanding of the complexity of English academic literacy within American community colleges. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Increasingly, school leaders recognize the need for writing instruction to become a schoolwide priority. The writers' workshop approach that was popularized 30 years ago is still relevant; it is still important to give students protected time to write, opportunities to address topics and audiences that matter, and timely feedback. Recent research emphasizes that students also benefit from explicit instruction in the craft and structure of specific types of writing and from working toward clear images of good writing. Teachers can accelerate students' growth by developing shared expectations for good writing and a common language for talking about writing. Clear goals are important for teachers, too. Shared knowledge of effective writing instruction and ways to track writing growth over time lift the level of instruction across a school, supporting teacher-to-teacher collaboration. When student growth is regarded as feedback to teachers on their teaching, assessment-based instruction helps schools participate in continuous improvement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Teachers' understandings of second language learning influence their practices in the classroom. This paper analyzes interview and classroom data collected during a yearlong ethnographic study of two high school English language development classes to identify (1) what the teachers understood about second language (L2) development and L2 academic writing, and (2) to what extent these perspectives manifested in the teachers' writing instruction. Analyses suggest that both the teachers felt that language could be learned inductively through exposure to models and that writing instruction should focus on essay structure and correctness. Their teaching, however, was also constrained by accountability pressures from high stakes writing assessments. I argue that the teachers' approaches reflected a restrictive understanding not aligned with a situated perspective on language and writing development and therefore denied their multilingual students' opportunities to learn academic language for writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pre-sessional EAP courses in the UK fulfil a difficult dual role. Not only are they charged with helping students learn the academic language and literacy skills they will require on their degree courses, but they are also expected to summatively assess those skills in order to decide on the readiness of students to begin English medium degree study. This creates tension between assessment and learning. Students are often extrinsically motivated by the need for a passing grade rather than focussing on the learning gains they make throughout the course. For this reason it is important that the approach to assessment on pre-sessional courses actually supports learning. This paper outlines the approach taken to the assessment of academic writing on the PEAP course at Nottingham Trent University. It describes how the assessment was redesigned to emphasise process over end product and to maximise early and sustained student engagement. This was achieved by careful scaffolding of the writing process, the strategic use of summative elements of the assessment, and an emphasis on formative feedback, reflection, and understanding of the assessment criteria. The paper considers how this approach to assessment is supporting student learning but also points out some ongoing concerns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Learning to write in middle school requires the expansion of sentence-level and discourse-level language skills. In this study, we investigated later language development in the writing of a cross-sectional sample of 235 upper elementary and middle school students (grades 4-8) by examining the use of (1) lexico-grammatical forms that support precise and concise academic writing and (2) paragraph-level structures for organizing written discourse, known as micro-genres. Writing studies typically elicit and analyze long compositions, instead the present study employed two brief writing tasks that allowed for the evaluation of language skills while minimizing the influence of topic knowledge and other non-linguistic factors. Results of structural equation modeling revealed that the two facets of language proficiency studied-lexico-grammatical skills and skill in producing paragraph-level structures (micro-genres)-represented distinguishable dimensions of productive language skill in this sample. On both dimensions, older writers (grades 6-8) demonstrated greater skill than 4th and 5th graders. These findings, which provide an initial proof of concept for the use of short writing tasks to study language skills that support academic writing, are discussed in relation to writing theory and pedagogy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the influence of the writing errors made by first year Chemistry students at CPUT. The aim is to determine their pedagogic implications. Effectively, students writing in a second language at university exhibits linguistic errors which when properly defined and corrected can promote epistemological access to and mastery of disciplinary knowledge. Error Analysis provided theoretical and analytical framework for this study. Unlike classical Contrastive Analysis (CA), Error Analysis (EA) analyses all sources of errors (Sanal, 2008). EA suggests that the learners' learning strategies are the main causes of errors. These errors are: 'transfer', 'overgeneralisation', 'simplification', 'avoidance' and 'overproduction' (Zhuang, 2011). This qualitative study examined and analysed a corpus of Chemistry 1 students' essays. It was found that mother tongue interference, syntactic and morphological errors, misapplication of essay construction rules, punctuation and spelling errors compromise the quality, meaning and rhetoricality. Essentially, the results provided feedback to the lecturers regarding the nature of students' writing errors and how have the students progressed toward the acquisition of academic language. Therefore, the study establishes the need for a tailored academic literacy intervention to promote academic language proficiency in the Chemistry discipline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Effective academic writing is accessible to readers because writers follow shared conventions for organization and signal their stance on particular topics; however, few specifics are known about how middle graders might develop knowledge of and use these academic language forms and functions to signal their organization and stance in persuasive essays. This study examined how differences in organization and stance marker use was related to writing quality in 664 persuasive essays written by 176 sixth, seventh, and eighth grade students. Essays were collected in the context of a supplemental vocabulary program, transcribed and analyzed for length by researchers, scored for overall writing quality by a team of teachers, and then coded for markers of organization and stance by researchers. Multilevel modeling results reveal that two specific emergent organizational marker types (evidence markers and code glosses) have statistically significant negative relationships to quality, and the variety of stance markers used is a positive predictor of quality when an interaction with length is included in the model. Findings give insight into the ways students are using organization and stance markers and point toward these language forms and functions as potentially pedagogically-relevant and worth assessing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]