This study aims to explore to what extent syntactic complexity predicts holistic scores generated by China's two prominent automated writing evaluation systems--"pigai" and "iWrite," the results of which will have some implications for the validity of these two systems. In the meanwhile, this study targets how syntactic…

Purpose: Both fictional oral narrative and expository oral discourse skills are critical language competencies that support children's academic success. Few studies, however, have examined African American children's microstructure performance across these genres. To address this gap in the literature, the study compared African American…

This study presents an in-depth exploration of the types of discursive functions of teacher questioning and the potential cognitive correspondences embedded in the questioning. The participants were a science teacher and his class of 26 sixth-grade students who were engaged in an immersion science inquiry activity. The major data source was a…

Vocabulary and communication are essential components of mathematics that should be addressed in the classroom. Knowledge of mathematical vocabulary has been argued as a necessary building block for students to engage in purposeful discourse. However, previous studies primarily focus on vocabulary instruction strategies specifically for English…

The use of writing models with nonnative English speakers has received a certain amount of criticism--especially from teachers whose students copy models in their entirety or follow them too closely. The misuse of models has brought some teachers to the point where they believe that the best kind of pedagogy is to abandon writing models…

This article explores the complexity of learning the literacy practices and conventions in the discipline of English language arts. Literacies are explored in the areas of writing/composition, reading/literature, and language/grammar, with attention to the situated nature of proper expression and understanding with respect to each. The author…

We evaluated the narrative and expository writing samples of 12 adolescents with language-learning disabilities (LLD) in Grades 6 to 12 for elements of microstructure (e.g., productivity, grammatical complexity) and macrostructure (genre-specific text structure elements) using an experimental measure. Writing samples were elicited with…

We evaluated the effects of student characteristics (sight word reading efficiency, phonological decoding, verbal knowledge, level of reading ability, grade, gender) and text features (passage difficulty, length, genre, and language and discourse attributes) on the oral reading fluency of a sample of middle-school students in Grades 6-8 (N =…