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This study aims to examine the writing outcomes of 6th-grade students learning English as a second language.

In all 45 students in a text structure instruction (TSI) group were compared with 45 students in a self-regulated strategy instruction (SRSI) group and 43 students receiving traditional writing instruction. SRSI was adapted from the self-regulated strategy development (SRSD) model (MacArthur et al., 2015). The SRSD model includes self-regulation writing strategies, text and genre knowledge and think-aloud modeling. Findings allowed for a comparison of TSI and SRSI, in which organization knowledge does not need to be taught using SRSD methods. Measures of writing outcomes, including writing quality and summarization of main ideas, were administered after a one-month intervention.

Results revealed that, compared with traditional instruction, the TSI and SRSI groups each exhibited better writing outcomes. Compared with the traditional instruction group, each technique had a unique impact: SRSI on writing quality, and TSI on main ideas included in written summaries. Linguistic and textual analyses of students’ writing revealed that the TSI and SRSI group learners both demonstrated high syntactic complexity, content organization and lexical variation in their compositions.

The present study provides empirical evidence that explicit teaching of SRSI writing strategies or TSI can be implemented effectively and elicit gains in elementary school L2 learners’ written output. A clear division does not exist between self-regulated writing strategies and text structure knowledge; the two techniques should be complementary, as suggested in the earlier SRSD model.

Classroom-based research has addressed the need to enhance self-regulated capacity in writing. However, writing has become more challenging for primary school learners. In addition, writing is a cognitively demanding process. The plethora of processes involved in writing may be one of the factors that caused difficulties in writing. Thus, writing proficiency relies on the development of text structure knowledge and the fostering of self-regulation capabilities.

Purpose – The primary purpose of this chapter is to offer classroom teachers, administrators, and program specialists specific “big picture” strategies to support upper grade English learners in comprehending expository content-area texts that offer challenges not present in narrative or story-like texts.Design/methodology/approach – Two separate approaches for helping English learners to identify content topics, text structures, and key ideas that control text selections are described and modeled: the Advance Organizer and PLAN (Predict, Locate, Add, and Note).Findings – When learners engage in specific, step-by-step “big picture” processes to understand text structure, organization, and concepts/vocabulary (not relying simply on decoding, or sounding out words), they attain higher levels of comprehension and retention.Research limitations/implications – “Big picture” strategies are well-documented in research as having advantages for all learners who interact with expository text structures – but are especially effective for English learners who may struggle with unfamiliar text structures and higher levels of academic and technical content-area vocabulary.Practical implications – Specific directions for (and advantages of) implementing two big picture strategies that are adaptable to a wide range of grade levels and content-area topics are presented. Teachers can easily modify the strategies in flexible ways to personalize the use of these strategies for English learners in any content-area context.Originality/value of chapter – With step-by-step directions, templates, and examples of content-area texts to guide them, teachers can easily utilize these strategies with English learners using a whole class, small-group, or one-to-one intervention approach.

Scientific abstracts reproduce only part of the information and the complexity of argumentation in a scientific article. The purpose of this paper provides a first analysis of the similarity between the text of scientific abstracts and the body of articles, using sentences as the basic textual unit. It contributes to the understanding of the structure of abstracts.

Using sentence-based similarity metrics, the authors quantify the phenomenon of text re-use in abstracts and examine the positions of the sentences that are similar to sentences in abstracts in the introduction, methods, results and discussion structure, using a corpus of over 85,000 research articles published in the seven Public Library of Science journals.

The authors provide evidence that 84 percent of abstract have at least one sentence in common with the body of the paper. Studying the distributions of sentences in the body of the articles that are re-used in abstracts, the authors show that there exists a strong relation between the rhetorical structure of articles and the zones that authors re-use when writing abstracts, with sentences mainly coming from the beginning of the introduction and the end of the conclusion.

Scientific abstracts contain what is considered by the author(s) as information that best describe documents’ content. This is a first study that examines the relation between the contents of abstracts and the rhetorical structure of scientific articles. The work might provide new insight for improving automatic abstracting tools as well as information retrieval approaches, in which text organization and structure are important features.

In this chapter, we describe how a rubric-style observation instrument for observing classroom writing instruction was used to focus and optimize collaborative video analysis sessions among teachers and researchers spread across six states. As part of a three-year Institute of Education Sciences (IES) development grant, we used videos of classroom instruction both as data for researchers studying the nature and impact of a specific instructional approach, Strategic and Interactive Writing Instruction (SIWI), and as a vehicle for collaborative teacher professional development – for both teachers and teacher leaders.

By tying video analysis to a shared observation instrument, we were able to target video clip selection for discussion and focus our analysis to support teachers across several states and school settings implementing a new approach to writing instruction. After a brief overview of the project for which videos were used, we describe the tools and protocols developed over time to ensure the efficient and powerful use of collaborative video analysis. We also share our experiences on the nature and outcomes of these collaborative sessions both in terms of teachers’ involvement and changes in practice over time.

We argue that the use of a common rubric to guide video clip selection, discussion, and analysis allowed teachers to strategically engage in “data reduction” – that is, not be overwhelmed by the amount of video data – and to use the videos as catalysts for conversations as well as evidence of what works well for individual students. As researchers, these sessions allowed us to ensure collaborative video analysis sessions were focused, efficient, and growth-oriented as well as sources of data for understanding trends in challenges and trajectories of growth for teachers implementing a new approach to instruction.

This work illustrates how researchers can use video for dual purposes – to conduct literacy investigations and to provide teachers with professional development involving video review and reflection.

Purpose – To provide educators with a new paradigm for teaching struggling readers that reaches, teaches, and increases comprehension based on authentic, accelerated/enriched, integrated instruction supported by brain research.Design/methodology/approach – The chapter highlights multiple specific steps based on extensive research that educators can take to increase reading achievement for struggling readersFindings – The instructional approach and methods identified in the chapter have demonstrated success in increasing reading achievement for struggling readers and prepares them to be successful readers in the 21st century.Research limitations/implications – The chapter focuses on a great body of research that supports the paradigm shift developed in the chapter which has been used to develop effective instruction with demonstrated results.Practical implications – This chapter presents a framework for rethinking traditional approaches for teaching struggling readers and provides a comprehensive approach for teacher educators, reading specialists, and classroom teachers to transform by using a new paradigm that leads to success.Originality/value of chapter – Originality centers on a new paradigm. Value centers on the impact this new paradigm will make on increasing motivation, engagement, and comprehension of struggling readers.

This study aims to explore how teachers in a large, diverse district could use a complex adolescent literacy curriculum, and it coincided with the start of the coronavirus 2019 pandemic, also a time of great upheaval for this nation. The authors and district partners collaboratively designed document sets that could help students explore socially complex historical topics with discipline-specific reading and writing support. These challenges led to fully virtual PD and redesigned cognitive tools and lesson materials that could be used in a fully distanced learning environment.

PD and data collection were ongoing and iterative, as the authors' goals were to understand variability in teachers' understanding and how the social unrest in the nation and the need for distance learning would influence their application of our curriculum. Data sources included teacher artifacts, interviews and implementation surveys and anonymized student work samples. The third author wrote memos during webinars and district meetings. The authors employed a grounded theory approach to analyze teachers’ evolving understandings of how to teach students to make judgments, their lesson differentiation and their attention to social justice issues.

Teachers who attended the authors' online PD increased their knowledge of the authors' cognitive apprenticeship (CA) approach to instruction, demonstrating more sophisticated understandings of important historical thinking skills and the need to provide students with explicit instruction and appropriate cognitive scaffolds. By the end of the year, teachers also showed ease in using new technological platforms and a more flexible use of disciplinary thinking scaffolds in ways the authors hoped. Finally, teachers in the authors' sample (and their students) frequently made connections between topics and sources in the authors' curriculum and ongoing societal problems (such as systemic racism) in this nation.

The authors' original sample of teachers was over 70; however, this number eventually fell to nine teachers (about 12.5% of the eligible participants) due to many ongoing challenges (e.g. teaching while parenting) during this time period. The authors note that teachers who remained engaged with the authors had over 10 years of experience and all but one had at some point been in a leadership position such as a team lead or department head. It is possible that experience teachers found on the authors' curriculum intervention to be too challenging to implement during the pandemic.

Online PD can be successful when sessions focus on content that teachers will use with students. We provided video models showing teachers how to teach historical reading and writing using the authors' tools and supports authors' platform. Although brief, the authors gave teachers opportunities for collaborative practice during webinars, and time to share challenges related to virtual teaching. In return, teachers shared what was working for them and allowed the authors to use anonymized student materials as the basis for subsequent materials for teaching students to make historical judgments.

All students, including those with learning or attentional disabilities/difficulties, emergent bilingual students, underrepresented students or marginalized students, must learn to grapple with complex historical and political information. Doing so will support their ability to make sense of conflicting and/or politicized information that pervades the media today and to judge for themselves what counts as evidence and truth.

Although there are a small number of teachers, this study shows that a strong research partnership between a university and district office can support the successful implementation of a complex historical literacy curriculum that allows students to explore social justice issues while learning important disciplinary literacy skills. Future work will share student learning outcomes.

This chapter offers a re-description of knowledge organization in light of genre and activity theory. Knowledge organization needs a new description in order to account for those activities and practices constituting and causing concrete knowledge organization activity. Genre and activity theory is put forward as a framework for situating such a re-description.

By means of genre and activity theory, the chapters argues that understanding the genre and activity systems, in which every form of knowledge organization is embedded, makes us capable of seeing how knowledge organization, as a genre, both can be a tool and an object in genred human activities.

In contrast to much research into knowledge organization, this chapter does not emphasize techniques, standards, or rules to be the sole object of study. Instead, an emphasis is put on the genre and activity systems informing and shaping concrete forms of knowledge organization activity. With this, we are able to understand how knowledge organization activity also contributes to construct genre and activity systems and not only aid them.

The authors use concepts from the “communication constitutes organizations” (CCO) literature in combination with Cooren’s (2010, 2012) ventriloquism to demonstrate the symbolic uses of texts and shifting interpretations of authority during a negotiation regarding the future of a nonprofit educational institution. The two sides negotiating over how to resolve a fiscal crisis struggled to achieve legitimacy through competing institutional logics, and this paper captures this process through a detailed account. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This study emerged from a multi-year full immersion ethnography undertaken by the second author, who spent over 5,000 hours as a participant observer at the organization. The quotes and observations come form field notes taken during this time.

Communication constitutes the nonprofit institution through two communication flows – self-structuring processes and institutional positioning – and these flows symbolically and materially unified the opposing negotiation parties during the negotiation process as each side struggled to gain legitimacy through competing institutional logics. The process of ventriloquism was the mechanism through which different actors and texts negotiated their levels of authority.

This case demonstrates how oppositional groups used and viewed texts throughout a negotiation process, revealing the agency, authority, legitimacy, and symbolic power of texts. This case also highlights the political struggle between institutional logics backed by financial models and professional logics backed by traditional organizational values.

At a material level, this case is a detailed examination of organizational members navigating the negotiation process during a fiscal crisis, but on a symbolic level this case demonstrates the communicative means through which oppositional groups negotiate core organizational values, and whether past values can lead organizations to a sustainable future. The observational depth of this case study was only possible through long term, full immersion ethnography, and this depth provides clarity to abstract concepts from CCO, ventriloquism, and institutional theory.

This chapter will examine the interplay among actors who took part in the process of consensus building towards a post-2015 education agenda via different channels of global governance, including both formal and informal channels.

Most of the forums and entities established as part of the global governance structure are composed of representatives from UN or UNESCO member states, civil society organizations (CSOs) and UN agencies. However, each of these categories has diverse constituent groups; representing these groups is not as straightforward a task as the governance structure seems to assume. Therefore, based on interviews and qualitative text analysis, this chapter will introduce major groups of actors and their major issues of concern, decision-making structure, mode of communication and relationship with other actors. Then, based on an understanding of the characteristics of the various channels and actors, it will present the structural issues that arose during the analysis of post-2015 discourse and the educational issues that emerged as the shared concerns of the ‘education community’. While most of the analysis to untangle the nature of discourse relies on qualitative analysis of texts and interviews, the end of this chapter will also demonstrate the trends of discourse in quantitative terms.

What was the post-2015 discourse for the so-called education community, which in itself has an ambiguous and virtual existence? The keywords post-2015 and post-EFA provide us with an opportunity to untangle how shared norms and codes of conduct were shaped at the global scale.

Field emergence poses an intriguing problem for institutional theorists. New issue fields often arise at the intersection of different sectors, amidst extant structures of meanings and actors. Such nascent fields are fragmented and lack clear guides for action; making it unclear how they ever coalesce. The authors propose that provisional social structures provide actors with macrosocial presuppositions that shape ongoing field-configuration; bootstrapping the field. The authors explore this empirically in the context of social impact investing in the UK, 2000–2013, a period in which this field moved from clear fragmentation to relative alignment. The authors combine different computational text analysis methods, and data from an extensive field-level study, to uncover meaningful patterns of interaction and structuration. Our results show that across various periods, different types of actors were linked together in discourse through “actor–meaning couplets.” These emergent couplings of actors and meanings provided actors with social cues, or macrofoundations, which guided their local activities. The authors thus theorize a recursive, co-constitutive process: as punctuated moments of interaction generate provisional structures of actor–meaning couplets, which then cue actors as they navigate and constitute the emerging field. Our model re-energizes the core tenets of new structuralism and contributes to current debates about institutional emergence and change.