Cohesion is a very important part of learning English. The Cohesion Theory of Halliday and Hasan is of great importance for people to acquire the knowledge of cohesion. This study is aimed at applying this Cohesion Theory in CET-4 listening comprehension which is an important test for Chinese college students. This study uses the test papers of…

Based on the theoretical approaches to interlanguage and discourse cohesiveness, this study examines international students' growth in discourse awareness and discourse competence in the teaching of elementary Chinese reading and writing, and explores a set of assessment methods for teaching discourse. The learners' knowledge and production of…

Students are required to master effective sentences to support their writing skills. However, students often struggle with comprehending and constructing effective sentences due to their limited proficiency and competence. This research examines the comprehension of effective sentences through grammaticality judgment tests and its implications for…

A large number of research studies have highlighted the relevance of oral narratives for describing children's linguistic constraints, developmental stages of narrative discourse patterns, and sociocultural identities. Yet, little research has been found on the use of oral narratives as a means to longitudinally improve oral discourse coherence…

Achieving a sufficient IELTS band score for academic purposes has been a major goal of many L2 learners around the world, especially those in Asia. However, IELTS writing scores were consistently reported to be the lowest when compared to the scores in speaking, reading, and listening. Despite a growing body of research in IELTS writing, little…

Discourse markers (DMs) are linguistic forms characterized by their use as conversation organizers or pause fillers (Fox Tree, 2010). Although used frequently in both speech and writing, DMs are not often taught in L2 classrooms, despite incorrect usage causing potential misunderstandings (Polat, 2011). Additionally, L2 learners have been observed…

With the incremental integration of technology in writing assessment, technology-generated feedback has found its way to take further steps toward replacing human corrective feedback and rating. Yet, further investigation is deemed necessary regarding its potential use either as a supplement to or replacement for human feedback. This study aims to…

The role of context in cloze tests has long been seen as both a benefit as well as a complication in their usefulness as a measure of second language comprehension (Brown, 2013). Passage cohesion, in particular, would seem to have a relevant and important effect on the degree to which cloze items function and the interpretability of performances…

The purpose of the current study is to explore the potential impact of a goal-based writing program on EFL students' writing competence and their attitudes toward goal-setting activities. The goal-based writing program was developed within goal-setting theory and launched in a writing class of 39 EFL Vietnamese university students over ten weeks.…

This study examines the effect of enhanced input of lexical chunks on the performance of Arabic-speaking English learners' writings. Lexical chunks, containing their forms, meanings, and functions, stored and recovered as a single component in brains, may alleviate language processing problems and increase language proficiency. The research…

The goal of this study was to assess the relationships between computational approaches to analyzing constructed responses made during reading and individual differences in the foundational skills of reading in college readers. We also explored if these relationships were consistent across texts and samples collected at different institutions and…

L2 test developers often use scripted spoken texts in their L2 listening tests, because it is efficient and practical to create scripted spoken texts that meet predetermined test specifications. But because scripted spoken texts differ in a number of fundamental ways from unscripted spoken language, there are potential threats to validity when…

Being a configuration of logically interconnected statements realized in moves and stages, an argumentative essay is built around the notion of textual unity achieved through lexico-grammar and semantic associations. The study attempted to analyze the role of cohesion in the rhetorical structure of undergraduate EFL students. Hence, the 13 moves…

Discourse competence is an essential component of communicative competence and central to the mastery of academic writing. This article reports a three-tiered diagnostic assessment of two English as a foreign language (EFL) student writers' discourse competence in terms of textual features, composing strategies, and knowledge about academic…

This study examined the development of text complexity for the past 25 years of reading comprehension passages in the National Matriculation English Test (NMET) in China. Text complexity of 206 reading passages at lexical, syntactic, and discourse levels has been measured longitudinally and compared across the years. The natural language…