In this work, we explore the use of digital technologies and statistical analysis to monitor how Italian secondary school students' writing changes over time and how comparisons can be made across different high school types. We analyzed more than 2,000 exam essays written by Italian high school students over 13 years and in five different school…

Despite extensive research on task planning in L2 writing contexts, the optimal length of pre-task planning time remains uncertain due to varying lengths used in TBLT studies. This study aimed to address this gap by investigating the effects of different pre-task planning times (nil, 5, 10, and 15 minutes) on the argumentative writing task…

The authors of this study examined a virtually delivered multimedia expository writing strategy via a single case multiple-baseline across participants design with three college students enrolled in a postsecondary program for students with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Participants responded to expository essay prompts at the…

Reflective writing is an important educational practice to train reflective thinking. Currently, researchers must manually analyze these writings, limiting practice and research because the analysis is time and resource consuming. This study evaluates whether machine learning can be used to automate this manual analysis. The study investigates…

Textism, which refers to the special language used in text messaging, is widely used in several forms of communication, such as texting, online chatting and emails. This increased use of textism has alarmed the media and the public because this special language can impact the academic writing of the younger generation. This paper aimed at…

Despite increasing pressure for children to learn to write at younger ages, there are many unanswered questions about composition skills in early elementary school. The goal of this research was to examine the dimensionality of composition skills in kindergarten children, thereby adding to current knowledge about the measurement of young…

Despite increasing pressure for children to learn to write at younger ages, there are many unanswered questions about composition skills in early elementary school. The goal of this research was to examine the dimensionality of composition skills in kindergarten children, thereby adding to current knowledge about the measurement of young…

This qualitative case study examined the effect of writing sessions, conducted at a university literacy festival, on the construction of college admission essays. Sessions were conducted by authors of multicultural young adult literature and university writing center staff and students. Each session focused on helping 132 high school students from…

Metaphors are known to present both opportunities and challenges for second language learners, but relatively little is known about learners' awareness of them. To investigate this, we analyzed 72 argumentative essays written in English by a group of 37 intermediate Chinese university students of English. We identified metaphors using an…

Multidimensional (MD) analysis contributes to a comprehensive linguistic description of second language (L2) writing texts. However, cross-linguistic studies based on MD analysis are still insufficient and need to be increased. In particular, the unavailability of comparable corpora prevents current MD-based L2 writing research from making…

This article reports on a comparative analysis of two sets of essays, student-discursive essays (SDEs) and ChatGPT-generated discursive essays (ChatGPT-GDEs) on the same essay topic using Coh-Metrix. It focused on three Coh-Metrix indices, lexical density, syntactic complexity, and referential cohesion as the basis for the comparative analysis.…

Appropriate use of cohesive devices is an important writing skill. Recently, there has been growing research on cohesiveness in ESL students' texts at university level. However, research into secondary school students' writing and learners' perceptions of cohesive devices has remained underexplored. This case study investigated the use of…

The current study presents results from students' engagement of composing print essays and composing across modes on the same topic. It builds on the premise that print-based reading and writing should complement and coexist with multimodal pedagogy. A group of Taiwanese adolescent students were invited to complete one print essay and one…

This randomized controlled trial with first- and second-grade students is the first experimental study addressing long-running disagreements about whether primary grade students should develop transcription and oral language abilities before learning to compose. It is also the first study at these grade levels to teach close reading (using science…

The current study aimed to investigate the tendency to use temporal markers (TMs) in English writing by three different levels of Thai writers. Data used in this study were based on the Corpus of Thai Writers of English. The corpus size of approximately 8,800,000 words consisted of essay writing produced by intermediate and advanced student…