This study aims to relate readability degree with thematic structures, a concept based on Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). The texts chosen were fragments purposively sampled from three popular academic texts written by Pierre Bourdieu (1991) (Text 1), Norman Fairclough (1989) (Text 2), and Bill Ashcroft et al. (2002) (Text 3). The Theme…

Practitioner-oriented dissertations are unique in their potential to address wicked problems through relevant and timely applications of empirical research that can facilitate rapid change. This account describes the dossier style dissertation, a newly re-imagined dissertation of Johns Hopkins University's Doctor of Education program, with two…

This study examines 39 education doctorate (EdD) dissertations that were completed by members of five cohorts of EdD students from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's (UNL) Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education (TLTE) to consider what constitutes an alternative dissertation. All of the dissertation authors began their EdD…

People regularly read multi-line texts in different formats and publishers, internationally, must decide how to present text to make reading most effective and efficient. Relatively few studies have examined multi-line reading, and fewer still Chinese multi-line reading. Here, we examined whether texts presented in single or double columns, and…

Previous research based on large-scale studies consistently suggests that on average, male students tend to have lower literacy compared to their female students during secondary schooling. However, this gender gap in literacy seems to "disappear" during adulthood. Up until today, only a few studies investigated the role of assessment…

In this article, a dialogue text feature extraction model based on big data and machine learning is constructed, which transforms the high-dimensional space of text features into the low-dimensional space that is easy to process, so that the best feature words can be selected to represent the document set. Tests show that in most cases, the…

Natural languages distinguish between telic predicates that denote events leading to an inherent endpoint (e.g., "draw a balloon") and atelic predicates that denote events with no inherent endpoint (e.g., "draw balloons"). Telicity distinctions in many languages are already partly available to 4-5-year-olds. Here, using…

While early career researchers (ECRs) often read and produce articles for peer reviewed journals, they are of ten less familiar with peer review reports (PRRs). Most ECRs learn about the genre of PRRs by reading reports written about their authored manuscripts, and through hands-on experience crafting their own PRRs, albeit often with little…

This article compared three-word move-specific lexical bundles (MLBs) in dissertation abstracts authored by linguistics doctoral students from China and the United States. Two separate corpora were constructed for analysis: (1) The China Linguistics PhD Abstracts Corpus (CLC), consisting of 700 abstracts totaling 613,713 words generated by…

As newspapers follow editorial work, the author's identity remains in the background. Hence, newspapers' discursive features should be studied from textual perspectives to understand the social dimension of the messages produced in such texts. What is more, pragmatically, the text as a whole and its separate language units with their structural…

This article presents the development of a specialized data set for analyzing Estonian metadiscourse markers in academic usage, extending Hyland's interpersonal metadiscourse model to a non-Indo-European language. Our goal is to show how metadiscourse, as a feature of a writing tradition, can reveal aspects of writing in languages other than…

This study explores how second language (L2) postgraduate writers from different disciplines at a Mexican university negotiate feedback on concerns about the structure of academic research genres (e.g., conference proposals, journal articles) with professional writing center tutors based in the United States, and it reports on those writers' main…

Writing is one of the important language abilities for students in universities. However, previous studies indicate that students' writing ability remains low, primarily due to their inadequate basic writing skills. This research is aimed to describe the students' writing ability of national insight-based text genre in university. A qualitative…

Engaging college students in purposeful academic tasks designed to foster both reading and writing competencies requires calculated decision-making regarding the goals and benefits of the literacy tasks used in college courses. Consequently, we explore text reformulation as a literacy strategy that aims to enrich students' reading and writing…

One way to support young children's factual learning is through shared book reading (reading books with a knowledgeable other). Many books that teach factual content are narrative in structure, in which factual content is embedded within a fictional storyline. However, there are gaps in our understanding of factors influencing children's factual…