This article compared three-word move-specific lexical bundles (MLBs) in dissertation abstracts authored by linguistics doctoral students from China and the United States. Two separate corpora were constructed for analysis: (1) The China Linguistics PhD Abstracts Corpus (CLC), consisting of 700 abstracts totaling 613,713 words generated by…

This study explores how second language (L2) postgraduate writers from different disciplines at a Mexican university negotiate feedback on concerns about the structure of academic research genres (e.g., conference proposals, journal articles) with professional writing center tutors based in the United States, and it reports on those writers' main…

Institutional ethnography (IE) is a feminist approach to research focusing on the organising power of texts and language. This paper explores "how" to analyse texts in IE while considering the importance of reflexivity and accountability to feminist research. Based on a five year study of UK university audit processes, I developed a…

Comparison is an important geographic method and a common task in geography education. Mastering comparison is a complex competency and written comparisons are challenging tasks both for students and assessors. As yet, however, there is no set test for evaluating comparison competency nor tool for enhancing it. Moreover, little is known about…

Recently, the readability of texts has become the focus of reading research because it is believed to have implications for reading comprehension, which is of utmost importance in the field of English as a foreign language (EFL), particularly in the teaching, learning and assessment of reading comprehension. Unfortunately, the influence of text…

This paper introduces a project to develop a digital academic writing tool at Leeds Beckett University (LBU). Essay X-ray is an interactive online tool designed to help students get to grips with the structure and style of academic writing and was developed using the Articulate Storyline 360 platform. The aim was to expand LBU's academic skills…

While research on postgraduate thesis writing has investigated how students cope with institutional assessment criteria, this study explores how students form their own criteria for self-assessment through the writing process, aiming to account for the development of their independent thinking in academic socialisation. Based on in-depth…

With the emergence of short video and the development of mobile internet, short video software, such as TikTok and Kwai, has emerged. Based on the semantic understanding technology of teaching short videos, a teaching management platform was built to push healthy and positive short video for students' content in a targeted way. Taking the 21st…

The prevalence of the acronym tl;dr ("too long; didn't read") suggests that people intentionally disengage their attention from long sections of text. We studied this real-world phenomenon in an educational context by measuring rates of intentional and unintentional mind-wandering while undergraduate student participants (n = 80) read…

The purpose of this study was to explore the nature of interactions among second/foreign language (L2) writing subskills. Two types of relationships were investigated: subskill-item and subskill-subskill relationships. To achieve the first purpose, using writing data obtained from the writing essays of 500 English as a foreign language (EFL)…

The aim of this study was to examine the effects of structure and navigation aids on students' learning from hypertexts. Participants were 48 undergraduate students. Group 1 (N = 24) read 2 hypertexts (one network, one hierarchical) with high navigation support (a graphical overview, a coherent links list, and use of different colours for visited…

Learning from videos is becoming an important part of educational activities. Whereas outlines have great potential, particularly during information seeking (IS), few studies have so far explored the effect of their presence in videos. The two aims of the present study were thus to 1) evaluate the influence of outlines on IS and learning, and 2)…

This study investigated what features undergraduate EFL learners perceive as affecting the difficulty of model paragraphs. Four hundred and seventy-five Vietnamese undergraduates participated in a partial least squares structural equation model design. They ranked five paragraphs from easiest to most difficult and responded to a 10-point Likert…

Hypertext comprehension often suffers from inadequate representation of the text's structure. Explication of the local paragraph macrostructure within each node might help to overcome this obstacle. As headings show several deficits, especially in digital text, marginalia are considered a promising alternative in signaling hypertext structure as…

Textual coherence is an important part of writing. This study examines whether textual coherence affects the quality of argumentative essays by evaluating papers written by 22 EFL university students. Firstly, the argumentative essays were evaluated by two raters using an AP English Argumentative Writing rubric available on Turnitin, an online…