This study was conducted to explore and analyze the most common essay writing errors among Saudi female learners at the departments of English, Majmaa'h University, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Therefore, the aim has been to identify those difficulties from an error analysis standpoint and identify the sources underlying them. An analysis of a written…

Errors in writing are unavoidable while students are trying to develop their writing skills. There have been several studies on identifying writing problems or errors in students' writing. It is believed that identifying students' written tasks is an effective tool to explore the difficulties involved in learning language. This helps teachers'…

Nonnative speakers of a language are often at a disadvantage in producing extended speech, as they have differing native (L1) phonological systems and rhetorical traditions or little experience in giving talks. Prosody in the form of stress, rhythm, and intonation is a difficult but crucial area needed to master extended speech because prosody…

Although Error Analysis (EA) has been broadly used in Foreign Language and Mother Tongue learning contexts, it has not been applied in the field of engineering and by STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) students in a systematic way. In this interdisciplinary pilot study, we applied the EA methodology to a wide corpus of…

Sixty-eight undergraduate translation students received direct instruction in the features of news headlines and news stories. A week later, they took a test that required them to identify the syntactic and lexical features of a sample of news headlines and news stories, supply deleted word, and substitute punctuation marks, infinitives, and block…

This IPP combines a literature review and a materials development project. The literature review outlines and supports the approach taken throughout the curriculum and the materials that were developed. First, it lays out the nature of Turkish universities' ELPPs [English Language Preparatory Programs]; then, it deals with the basic philosophy of…

Technology often mediates, and thus influences, written language conventions such as punctuation and capitalization. Fifty university students sent two text messages, one with an alphanumeric multi-press keypad mobile phone (i.e., Nokia 1101) and another with a full QWERTY keypad smartphone (i.e., Apple iPhone 4). Compared to text messages sent…

Background: Numerous studies have identified a gap between the writing skills of engineering program graduates and the demands of writing in the workplace; however, few studies have analyzed the writing of practitioners and students to better understand that gap and inform teaching materials. Purpose: This study sought to compare word-level,…

The authors in this study used a pre-posttest experimental design with random assignment to treatment or control group to assess the use of an electronic editing cognitive strategy. The participants were 16 college students with intellectual and developmental disabilities enrolled in a 2-year postsecondary program at a Midwestern institute of…

Braille-character recognition is one of the foundational skills required for teachers of braille. Prior research has evaluated computer programming for teaching braille-to-print letter relations (e.g., Scheithauer & Tiger, 2012). In the current study, we developed a program (the Visual Braille Trainer) to teach not only letters but also…

Researchers have found executive functioning (EF) to be important for reading and math performance but have paid less attention to their role in writing. Van Dijk and Kintsch (1983) identified three levels of writing: microstructure, macrostructure, and superstructure. The existing work on EF and writing has several limitations: researchers have…

This study examines the decision-making behaviors of raters with varying levels of experience while assessing EFL essays of distinct qualities. The data were collected from 28 raters with varying levels of rating experience and working at the English language departments of different universities in Turkey. Using a 10-point analytic rubric, each…

The current study examined the degree to which the quality and characteristics of students' essays could be modeled through dynamic natural language processing analyses. Undergraduate students (n = 131) wrote timed, persuasive essays in response to an argumentative writing prompt. Recurrent patterns of the words in the essays were then analyzed…

This article presents an analysis of the orthographic errors found in university students' asynchronous digital writing. A university and a society belonging to the twenty-first century require students and professionals who can use their language correctly in any context, device and mode of communication. The research was based on a sample of…

Inspired by the 'teaching as inquiry' model, we initiated a focusing inquiry on 2,811 English diagnostic tests that were taken in 2014-2015 by first-year students entering the Health Sciences programme at the University of Otago, a programme for aspiring health professionals. That inquiry aimed to improve the first-year paper taken by students who…