Student's low reading and writing proficiency in higher education has been the subject of a large body of research (e.g., Bahr, 2011; Bailey, 2010; Carlino, 2005, 2010, 2012; Flink, 2017; Jaggars, 2014 Pacello, 2014; Perin, 2011; Perin et al., 2013). The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore how students in a first-year developmental…

An important component of academic writing in English is the word combinations or collocations writers use while expressing meaning and performing various rhetorical functions. It is essential for second language (L2) writers to gain command of these lexico-grammatical combinations (Cortes, 2004; Hyland, 2008a, 2008b) as they develop their L2…

This study examined L2 (German) awareness in intermediate American college learners of German through their judgments of 15 texts that had been authored by either native speakers (NS) or non-native speakers (NNS) or had been created through Web-Based Machine Translation (WBMT). The specific objectives sought to investigate: (a) how learners…

A growing body of research suggests that the writing ability of international second language learners (IL2) and US-resident second language learners, also referred to as Generation 1.5 (G1.5), differs, despite a dearth of substantial empirical evidence supporting such claims. The present study provides much-needed empirical evidence concerning…

Performance assessments have become the norm for evaluating language learners' writing abilities in international examinations of English proficiency. Two aspects of these assessments are usually systematically varied: test takers respond to different prompts, and their responses are read by different raters. This raises the possibility of undue…