This study examines the impact of the College, Career, and Community Writers Program (C3WP) on upper-elementary students' first draft writing quality, addressing the challenges teachers face in providing timely and effective feedback on extensive student writing, particularly in spelling, grammar, mechanics, and cohesion. The hypothesis posits…

This corpus-based study investigates lexical richness in English writing by Chinese senior high school students. Lexical uses in 303 compositions were compared across three grades in terms of lexical sophistication, variation, density and errors. Timed compositions were sampled from Writing Corpus of English Learners, and the sample sizes of three…

This study investigated the use and functions of metadiscourse markers in English as a foreign language (EFL) virtual classroom during the Covid-19 pandemic. The study examined which metadiscourse markers--interactive or interactional--were used more frequently and how they were employed in an EFL context. It explored two interactive metadiscourse…

Discourse markers (DMs) are linguistic forms characterized by their use as conversation organizers or pause fillers (Fox Tree, 2010). Although used frequently in both speech and writing, DMs are not often taught in L2 classrooms, despite incorrect usage causing potential misunderstandings (Polat, 2011). Additionally, L2 learners have been observed…

One of the inspirational forms of integrating technology into Second Language (L2) teaching is using 'corpora'. In this study, corpora were used to develop printed instructional materials to teach grammatical cohesive devices that are not sufficiently represented in L2 English course books. Specifically, the aim was to understand whether the…

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…

The present study attempts to identify difficulties that Japanese students encounter with metadiscursive nouns in writing second language (L2) argumentation essays. Metadiscursive nouns are abstract and unspecific nouns which can serve as cohesive markers by retrieving their meanings in the text where they occur. Using a selected number of nouns…

While learners may have access to reference tools during second language (L2) writing, the latest developments in machine translation (MT), such as "Google Translate" requires examination as to how using the tool may factor into the second language learners' writing products. To this end, the purpose of this study was to examine how MT…

This study examined the development of text complexity for the past 25 years of reading comprehension passages in the National Matriculation English Test (NMET) in China. Text complexity of 206 reading passages at lexical, syntactic, and discourse levels has been measured longitudinally and compared across the years. The natural language…

In recent years, the use of English corpora to instruct grammar in writing classes has become increasingly popular. In English for Specific Purposes classes, such a novel approach is critically important since it not only allows teachers to achieve a profound understanding of which syntactic structures should be instructed, but it also increases…

Previous research has shown the effectiveness of peer reviewing on the improvement of writing quality. However, the fact that students themselves, arguably novices, judged the improvement leads to concerns about the validity of peer reviewing. We measured writing quality before and after peer reviewing using Coh-Metrix, which computationally…

Automated Writing Evaluation (AWE) systems have been found to enhance the accuracy, readability, and cohesion of writing responses (Stevenson & Phakiti, 2019). Previous research indicates that individual learners may have difficulty utilizing content-based AWE feedback and collaborative processing of feedback might help to cope with this…

Linking adverbials are important for creating textual cohesion in both written and spoken English. While there are reference grammar books describing the usage patterns of linking adverbials and studies investigating learners' difficulties in using these cohesive devices, there is little discussion on how to effectively teach and learn them. By…

Despite the current potential to use computers to automatically generate a large range of text-based indices, many issues remain unresolved about how to apply these data in established language teaching and assessment contexts. One way to resolve these issues is to explore the degree to which automatically generated indices, which are reflective…

This study investigates the extent to which microfeatures -- such as basic text features, readability, cohesion, and lexical diversity based on specific word lists -- affect Chinese EFL writing quality. Data analysis was conducted using natural language processing, correlation analysis and stepwise multiple regression analysis on a corpus of 268…