The present study investigated the potential of writing in English as a foreign language (EFL) for language learning by manipulating cognitive task complexity based on related models and hypotheses. English essays written by 59 Chinese postgraduate EFL students from different subject areas were analysed with reference to writing complexity,…

Although prior studies have suggested the benefits of a collaborative approach to providing peer feedback in EFL writing, little is known about how students engage in collaborative peer feedback (CPF) activities. This paper reports on a case study involving five Chinese EFL students who collaboratively provided feedback on five argumentative…

Phraseology has been flourishing in the field of English writing studies in recent years. However, the focus has primarily been on items with less variability, such as ngrams or lexical bundles. To address this gap, this study investigates concgrams (Cheng et al., 2006), which encompass both constituency and positional variations, in advanced…

In this single-case research design study, we investigated the effects of student-directed writing goals with adolescent writers who were developing their writing proficiency. Two students with a learning disability and two multilingual writers engaged in a pre-baseline condition to learn the functional elements of a persuasive essay. Once they…

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…

The present study analyzed the efficacy of a brief intervention aimed at scaffolding readers' "recursivity" (i.e., going back to the texts) while reading multiple texts and writing an argumentative essay. The participants were 151 university students, randomly assigned to two conditions: experimental (Recursivity-induced, RI) and active…

While the merits of dialogic talk for supporting students' learning is well documented, the contribution of specific talk moves on learning outcomes remains less understood. This study was conducted to investigate how student-generated talk moves during whole-classroom discussions, as captured by the Low-Inference Discourse Observation tool,…

Developing knowledge-transforming skills in writing may help students increase learning by actively building knowledge, regardless of the domain. However, many undergraduate students struggle to transform knowledge when drafting essays based on multiple sources. Writing analytics can be used to scaffold knowledge transforming as writers bring…

In this article, we share what we learned about undergraduates' struggles in writing quality summaries, comparison texts, and argumentative essays that were components of a unique course, Learning How to Learn. This course was designed to address core psychological issues that impede optimal learning for students from all majors, many of whom are…

This study explores syntactic and lexical complexity in argumentative essays written by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Humans (HS). First year Tswana second language (L2) learners of English in a South African University wrote the HS argumentative essays. The AI essays have been generated by ChatGPT-3.5 on the same topics. Using a…

Developing students' source-based argument writing skills is a vital educational goal for the 21st-century information society. Consequently, researchers and educators continually seek ways to understand and improve students' capacities for advancing arguments and synthesizing multiple documents, texts, or sources in a range of subject areas in…

In this article, I engage the psychoanalytic writings of Donald Winnicott, Thomas Ogden and Wilfred Bion, who proffer maternal reverie -- an intimate intersubjective communication between the mother and infant -- as an early model for the psychosomatic drifts of form and thought experienced in the analytic encounter. As a way to frame these…

This study aimed to explore adolescent second language (L2) writers' composition across media (text-based writing and digital multimodal composing). The goal was to investigate how and under what conditions these writers used semiotic resources when they engaged in both text-based writing and digital multimodal composing. Grounded in the concept…

Students are expected to interpret the complexities and nuances of literary texts yet might struggle with interpreting texts in ways that are academically valued in literary studies. While linguistic studies that examine students' literary interpretive writing have mainly been situated in secondary contexts, there is a noticeable absence of…

The technology company OpenAI released a generative artificial intelligence program that can create detailed written responses, write essays, poetry, code, and much more, in response to short written prompts. It had been years in the making and had been exposed to over 40 gigabytes of text, webpages, images, and other content. ChatGPT is a large…