PURPOSE As children develop skills in writing across academic contexts, clinicians and educators need to have a fundamental understanding of typical writing development as well as valid and reliable assessment methods. The purpose of this study was to examine the progression of linguistic elements in school-age children's narrative and expository writing development. METHOD Narrative and expo...

Sinhala writing system used in Sri Lanka is a syllabic writing system deriving from Brahmi and it consists of vowels, consonants, diacritical marks, and special symbols. Several of these are combined to form complex ligatures. Total number of different glyphs is almost close to 2300. Thus, all computer equipment for Sinhala language needs to provide for this degree of complexity in both display...

Arnau de Vilanova, one of the most important physicians of the Latin Middle Ages, was familiar with the vast majority of Aristotle's works that had been translated into Latin. He used a wide range of them, such as the Organon--the introductory books on logic - and the natural philosophical books, which cover a different branches of knowledge. He used Aristotle as an authority, trying to reconci...

Adriane Fugh-Berman examines documents unsealed in recent litigation to investigate how pharmaceutical companies promoted hormone therapy drugs, including the use of medical writing companies to produce ghostwritten manuscripts and place them into medical journals.

PURPOSE This study examined dimensions of written composition by using multiple evaluative approaches such as an adapted 6 + 1 trait scoring, syntactic complexity measures, and productivity measures. It further examined unique relations of oral language and literacy skills to the identified dimensions of written composition. METHOD A large sample of 1st-grade students (N = 527) was assessed o...

Methods: First, we constructed a questionnaire based on the descriptors collected from various sources in order to elicit university teachers’ views on the importance of these descriptors. A revised version was produced based on the feedback from the initial questionnaire survey. In order to further investigate what level or levels these remaining descriptors would fall into, 35 university teac...

Alternative assessment approaches and, among them, self-assessment and peer-assessment are becoming increasingly important in educational contexts. Designed to compare self-assessment, peer-assessment, and teacher-assessment, this study included 90 EFL students from 3 intact classes divided into 3 groups: self-assessment, peer-assessment, and teacher-assessment. After taking the TOEFL Proficien...

Urdu is the lingua franca as well as the national language of Pakistan. It is based on Arabic script, and Nastaleeq is its default writing style. The complexity of Nastaleeq makes it one of the world’s most challenging writing styles. Nastaleeq has a strong contextual dependency. It is a cursive writing style and is written diagonally from right to left. The overlapping shapes make the nuqta (d...

A writing system is a visual notation system wherein a repertoire of marks, or strokes, is used to build a repertoire of characters. Are there any commonalities across writing systems concerning the rules governing how strokes combine into characters; commonalities that might help us identify selection pressures on the development of written language? In an effort to answer this question we exa...