English as Foreign Language (EFL) writing is challenging for students due to the lack of related lexical resources to inspire them for meaningful writing besides grammar feedback. Moreover, it is crucial to design personalized feedback based on students' original writings in helping to improve their writing abilities. Therefore, we developed Smart…

Undergraduate students majoring in Islamic Studies in Saudi Arabia need to take an English-for-Specific-Purposes (ESP) course each year of the B.A. program. The material for all four courses was developed in-house by a group of instructors at those colleges. A review of the course material, particularly reading texts, showed many inadequacies. It…

This study has been conducted to evaluate transition marker (TM) types in the MA theses written by the native speakers (NSs) of English and Turkish speakers (TSs) of English. The purpose is to compare the most salient transition types of the NSs and TSs randomly selected theses introduction, results and discussion, and conclusion sections in the…

Assessing student writing is a complex task and experimental studies have shown that textual determinants, such as spelling or vocabulary, affect teachers' judgments of other analytic criteria in student essays. Among these elements, organisation has not been extensively explored. This experimental study examines how organisational quality…

Bilingual scientific literacy (BSL) is one of the educational domains gaining prominence in twenty-first century societies. University bilingual science courses are legitimate and desirable scenarios for the promotion of bilingual written scientific argumentation (BWSA) as part of BSL. Recent studies indicate that the use of 'logical connectors'…

While the bulk of feedback studies have focused on written corrective feedback, oral feedback in teacher-student writing conferences in EFL context has been underexplored. This article investigated teacher oral feedback based on the tenets of sociocultural theory. It examined the impact of teacher-student writing conferences on students' accuracy…

The article is devoted to the actual problem of teaching students of non-linguistic majors to write in a foreign language. The purpose of the study is to assess the students' level of written language competence. In 2018 and 2019, the Academic Competition (AC) of foreign languages "Prometheus" was held at South Ural State University…

Cohesion Theory of Halliday and Hasan has been widely applied in different parts of language teaching. As many cohesive devices are used in language, it's very necessary for language learners to understand and identify those devices. Now in China, a large number of college students have to take part in the CET-4 test every year. Thus, it is of…

Educational technologies with multimedia content can support effective learning, but these outcomes are moderated by learners' level of cognitive engagement or self-regulation. As a way to encourage deeper cognitive engagement without redesigning or redeveloping software (e.g., building more prompts, scaffolds, or automated support), this study…

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…

Questions under Discussion (QUDs) have been suggested to influence the integration of individual utterances into a discourse-level representation. Previous work has shown that processing ungrammatical ellipses is facilitated when the elided material addresses an implicit QUD raised through a nonactuality implicature (NAIs). It is not clear,…

The quality of any academic essay highly depends on cohesion and coherence since they affect the overall quality and the tone of the writing to a great extent. Conjunctive adverbials are among the types of devices which logically help linking sentences into paragraphs and paragraphs into essays. Conjunctive Adverbials ultimately affect the…

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…

This article studies students' use of sentence variety in an ESL writing course. The study includes three sentence features: (a) sentence types, (b) sentence combining, and (c) sentence patterns. Although sentence variety is part of the curriculum, the actual use of sentence structures has not been measured so far. By understanding students' use…