The 'empowerment' of students: a contribution from systemic functional grammar

Since there is no single pedagogical theory that may provide all necessary strategies for the successful teaching of academic essay writing at senior levels, this paper makes a small but hopefully interesting contribution from the basis of Systemic Functional Grammar. It is intended to supplement teachers’ insights into the linguistic characteristics of academic writing considered ‘Excellent’, as much as to offer strategies for empowering students with a clearer idea of what is expected of them in academic writing. It attempts this by making explicit some of the grammatical choices made by successful writers, and how those choices facilitate the presentation of knowledge and ideas in ways that fulfil the expectations readers (and examiners) have of merit‐worthy writing.     

Large-scale randomized controlled trial with 4th graders using intelligent tutoring of the structure strategy to improve nonfiction reading comprehension

Reading comprehension is a challenge for K-12 learners and adults. Nonfiction texts, such as expository texts that inform and explain, are particularly challenging and vital for students?? understanding because of their frequent use in formal schooling (e.g., textbooks) as well as everyday life (e.g., newspapers, magazines, and medical information). The structure strategy is explicit instruction about how to strategically use knowledge about text structures for encoding and retrieval of information from nonfiction and has consistently shown significant improvements in reading comprehension. We present the delivery of the structure strategy using a web-based intelligent tutoring system (ITSS) that has the potential to offer consistent modeling, practice tasks, assessment, and feedback to the learner. Finally, we report on statistically significant findings from a large scale randomized controlled efficacy trial with rural and suburban 4th-grade students using ITSS.