introduction How genre is understood and configured in analyses of disciplinary texts and discourses is key to understanding the nature of student work in the disciplines. The question of genre is also intimately linked to what we know about expert texts in a discipline. These relationships have been studied for some time in France, first through traditional-formalist frames of text types and m...

This paper will present a case study of e-textbooks usage in a 3,000 student, liberal arts college in Western New York, USA. Focus groups were conducted and a summary of results will be presented. Among the key questions are: Are e-books being used? What factors are considered in choosing an e-book over a traditional printed textbook? Is comprehension from an e-book the same as from a printed t...

In this paper, the authors discuss their continuing work on a NSF TUES Phase 1 project in which they are exploring the feasibility and effectiveness of a scalable concept map as an organizational tool for a digital textbook. This tool, termed the Adaptive Map, is designed to promote students’ conceptual understanding by using an expert-generated concept map as an advance organizer. Because larg...

In this paper, we propose a new video genre detection using semantic classification with multi-modal features. MPEG-7 audio-visual descriptors are used as multi-modal features. From the low-level multimodal features, genre as high-level semantic meaning is detected by using GINI index in Classification And Regression Tree (CART) algorithm. Experimental results show that the proposed method is u...

A friend of mine in the UK Paddy Walsh has passed on to me your recent ruminations on “How genre theory saved the world”. I note that Paddy is a former subject English teacher and SNS English consultant, and familiar with work done using genre theory in the UK. As I was one of the genre theorists with whom you exchanged articles in English in Australia a good many years ago, I thought I might r...

As part of its nonprofit mission, ETS conducts and disseminates the results of research to advance quality and equity in education and assessment for the benefit of ETS's constituents and the field. To obtain a PDF or a print copy of a report, please visit: Abstract The Common Core Standards call for students to be exposed to a much greater level of text complexity than has been the norm in sch...

Textbooks play a crucial role in English language teaching and learning. One of the methods for selecting the most appropriate textbook for a particular educational purpose is comparing two or several similar textbooks with each other. Textbook evaluation can provide useful information about the strengths and weaknesses of textbooks and can lead to the selection of the most suitable materials f...

The present qualitative research, for the first time, aimed at comparing and contrasting the extent cultural components and subcomponents are represented in the elementary levels of A Course in General Persian and Top Notch Series as foreign language teaching textbooks. The adapted checklist of Lee's Big ‘C' and little ‘c' cultural components (2009) was used for the current study.  After conten...

Science studies are an increasingly prominent interdisciplinary body of work. Now a diverse literature, one of its most consistent and common themes is a reluctance to accept the standard model of scientific explanation (‘internalism’) that conceives scientific knowledge, and the disciplines with which it is associated, as the product of a rationality that is progressively realized over time. I...