This study delves into the complex relationship between storytelling and historical understanding. Focused on how lower-secondary students employ narrative discourse in writing, it examines the extent to which their storytelling aids or limits historical comprehension. Drawing on systemic-functional linguistics and history education theories, the…

The research aims to enhance the handling of modal verbs (MVs) in EFL textbooks by leveraging perspectives from corpora that include both native speakers' language data and the language data of individuals who are learning the language. To assess the authenticity of language in textbooks, an analysis between the native corpus and a collection of…

Seventh-grade students engaged in a guided historical inquiry about slavery, freedom, and unfreedom. The teacher carefully intertwined historical content, close reading, critical thinking, and text-based writing -- both extemporaneous and refined-- during Social Studies. Students scrutinized primary sources to build their historical schemas over…

This study aimed at evaluating a PISA-like reading test developed by teachers participating in the teacher training for teaching PISA-like reading. To serve this purpose, an experimental test was administered to 107 students aged 15-16 using a set of text and questions constructed according to the criteria of the PISA Reading test Level 1. Item…

Media literacy education provides a toolbox for helping direct students' attention to the way we shape information for audience and purpose. The National Association for Media Literacy Education defines the core skills of media literacy as the ability to access, analyze, and evaluate information, as well as the ability to create and act on…

Along with forty-nine other high school students, as the author recounts of their student, Meghan is part of an elective two-week academic writing workshop. Each day begins with a freewrite exercise like this one, designed to help students develop what the workshop directors call "fluency." Like Meghan, many students write prolifically…

Process and product are always in tension. In authentic writing, they can be messy and hard to assess. Because writing is recursive and generative, every word written opens new possibilities. Not only that, but writing is influenced by ability, time allowed, task definition, rhetorical situation, relationship to reading, and helpful thinking…

Disciplinary literacy is gaining momentum as an approach to adolescent literacy. Believing that a key aspect of disciplinary literacy is knowledge construction, the authors introduce a model for relating disciplinary literacy with project-based inquiry. Rather than merely exploring topics during inquiry, students use practices of a discipline to…

The idea of "place" extends beyond the locations where people live. Place is a narrative which shapes identity and culture and provides an understanding of experience. By exploring place and the connections which evolve from place, an intriguing context begins to take a shape that inspires transformational ideas and actions. This article…

We explore three primary paradigms that continue to dominate writing instruction in secondary schools. By illustrating these paradigms, exploring their underlying assumptions with two classes of preservice teachers (PSTs) enrolled in a required course on teaching writing and identifying theoretical and pedagogical alternatives, we examine how…

In educational measurement contexts, essays have been evaluated and formative feedback has been given based on the end product. In this study, we used a large sample collected from middle school students in the United States to investigate the factor structure of the writing process features gathered from keystroke logs and the association of that…

In many cases, teachers shy away from including much writing because of the many hours it requires to read and provide substantial feedback on such papers. Yet writing is widely understood as critically important to learning (Applebee & Langer, 2013; Mayher, 1983; Zinsser, 1989). This article describes a program from the Northwest Arkansas…

Struck by his students' often hostile and apathetic responses to assignments and instruction and hoping to contribute to the knowledge of motivation, Dan LaSalle began to take an inquiry stance on his own practice. He studied his practice on three fronts with the help of an off-site teacher research group: (1) how his inquiry question changes as a…

This paper reports on the design and enactment of an instructional strategy aimed to support students in constructing scientific explanations. Informed by the philosophy of science and linguistic studies of science, a new instructional framework called premise--reasoning--outcome (PRO) was conceptualized, developed, and tested over two years in…

The Young Writers Program (YWP) is the latest writing workshop to be developed for the classroom. It challenges students to choose a topic and write a novel-length piece based on that topic, without worrying about spelling or grammar. While the foundation of this philosophy is solid, the support and structure of the Young Writers Program website…