The present study was conducted to determine the use of punctuation marks by freshmen college Turkish language course students whose native language was Turkish. The study is a quantitative study where descriptive techniques were used. The study group included 204 students (157 female and 57 male students). An anonymous short story text that did…

This paper is set up to outline the most common challenges in writing short sentences encountered by the first-year students at the English language departments at Al-Baha University campuses. The study is considered necessary because it raises the awareness of both students and instructors to improve their sentence writing. A mixed approach…

This study examines the nature of metalinguistic awareness in first-year college writers enrolled in two-year degree programs, corequisite support courses, or both. Metalinguistic awareness is an ability to systematize knowledge about language and use that knowledge to monitor language as language. Participants in the study completed reading…

Many EFL teachers spend a lot of time marking students' written assignments and correcting their spelling, grammatical, punctuation, organization and idea generation errors in detail. The more mistakes students make the more meticulously they mark and correct mistakes. Despite meticulous error correction, students continue to make the same…

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…

This study aimed at investigating linguistic errors committed by students majoring in Non-English Department in writing English composition. A total of 20 first year students at Economic College IBBI Medan who have taken an English subject course were involved in this study. Their compositions were analyzed for the purpose of scrutinizing…

Writing is considered as a daunting task in second language learning. It is argued by most scholars that this challenge is not only limited to second language speakers of English but even to those who speak English as their first language. Thus, the ability to communicate effectively in English by both native and non-native speakers requires…

The minimal-marking project conducted in Ryerson's School of Journalism throughout 2012 and early 2013 resulted in significantly higher grammar scores in two first-year classes of minimally marked university students when compared to two traditionally marked classes. The "minimal-marking" concept (Haswell, 1983), which requires…

Describes background, software development, and the Write-Well computer assisted instruction series used in a study at Illinois Institute of Technology. Composition students were divided into two groups, with one practicing comma usage with computer assisted instruction and another using textbooks. Results indicate computer assisted instruction…

Describes a classroom activity that emphasizes syntactic fluency and the richness of linguistic resources available in written language, while downplaying the "dos and don'ts" of traditional punctuation instruction. (RL)

Discusses the interrelationships between the terms thesis, content, meaning, and mechanics, indicating the problems these interrelationships cause teachers that evaluate student compositions. (RL)

An examination of 2,000 freshman themes, half written from 1950 to 1957 and half from 1973 to 1976, revealed that recent themes had many more deviations from standard usage, mechanics, and punctuation. (DD)

A study examined patterns of English usage in 52 Japanese university freshmen's written compositions, particularly in the use of the subordinating conjunction "because." It was found that students often fragmented sentences when "because" was involved, or used a comma to separate a trailing dependent "because" clause…