This study was carried out mainly to investigate the effects of class size and self-esteem on student achievement in--and attitude toward--English essay writing. The study was influenced by earlier research reports indicating that the large class sizes prevalent in Nigerian schools may be detrimental to student academic and emotional well-being.…

This text explores roles that radical empathy and profound interruptions play in altering prospective teachers' thinking and practices. Linking these concepts, I demonstrate how three teacher candidates drew on intersectional experiences in volunteer work, reading fiction and non-fiction, viewing films of "heroic" teachers, and personal…

Research shows that students write better academic essays if the instructor facilitates a process of preparation that allows for purposeful peer discussion. Drawing on screenwriting pedagogy, this article proposes a workshop model that lets students express their essay's structural elements as single sentences, which allows for effective peer and…

Automated writing scoring can not only provide holistic scores but also instant and corrective feedback on L2 learners' writing quality. It has been increasing in use throughout China and internationally. Given the advantages, the past several years has witnessed the emergence and growth of writing evaluation products in China. To the best of our…

Visualizations may help students understand the network of connections among multiple documents. This study explored how ninth-grade students used a novel digital document mapping scaffold to construct models of multiple documents. We examined students' maps and mapping processes in order to understand how they used the scaffold to visually…

This study investigates how aspects of collocational proficiency affect the ratings that expert examiners give to second language (L2) English learner essays. Lexical proficiency is a multi-faceted phenomenon and certain aspects of it are particularly impactful on human judgements, including lexical sophistication and accuracy. However, the…

The correct use of collocations and prepositions plays an essential role in writing. Previous research has demonstrated that students, who master these lexical elements, have a better language awareness, improve their reading and listening comprehension, and are more creative when making a composition. However, little specific work has been done…

The present study explores the status of argumentative essay writing strategy use and identifies the problems a convenient sample of Iranian EFL learners face while writing argumentative essays in English. Adopting a complementary process-genre approach and a mixed-methods research design, the researcher designed a genre-specific argumentative…

A multi-perspective, exploratory framework applicable to all critical thinking, creative and communication acts, 3D-Briefing synthesizes meticulous enquiry questions with a user-focused, equitable stance toward meaning production. It scaffolds identification, interpretation, evaluation, reflection and action in a user-empowered, three step process…

Few studies have examined the effects of using mediation tools (e.g., collaborative dialogs and online searches) on graduate students' academic writing in a computer-mediated collaborative writing environment. This study investigated what types of co-constructed writing knowledge the graduate students generated from using the mediation tools to…

On August 3rd, 2019, a racially-charged mass shooting occurred at Walmart in El Paso, TX that killed 23 people and injured another 23. Following the Walmart shooting, students in this borderland region wrote essays related to their experiences. We used the themes we identified to inform implications for teaching writing and composition for middle…

This research aims to investigate the effects of two teaching sequences -- interleaving and blocking -- on the participants' use of three types of cohesive devices (conjunctions, conjunctive adverbs and prepositions [thereafter CCPs]) in their argumentative essays. The participants included 50 native Cantonese-speaking university students taking…

Academic writing is a key determinant to be successful in higher education institutions, and graduation requirements often involve students producing theses and dissertations using academic writing skills after conducting research. The COVID-19 pandemic has greatly affected pre-service teachers' learning in higher education institutions, and with…

This study explored the relationship between linguistic features and the rated quality of letters of application (LAs) and argumentative essays (AEs) composed in English by Chinese college-level English as a foreign language (EFL) learners. A corpus of 260 LAs and 260 AEs were analyzed via a confirmatory factor analysis. Latent variables were EFL…

In most academic writing programs worldwide, instruction aims to develop students' awareness of essay types, written language use, and test-taking strategies. However, teachers' instructional practice is often dictated by their knowledge base, perception, and the intuitions they have about language use (Borg, 2006). Such intuitions are not always…