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…

Being a configuration of logically interconnected statements realized in moves and stages, an argumentative essay is built around the notion of textual unity achieved through lexico-grammar and semantic associations. The study attempted to analyze the role of cohesion in the rhetorical structure of undergraduate EFL students. Hence, the 13 moves…

Cohesion features were calculated for a corpus of 960 essays by 480 test-takers from the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) in order to examine differences in the use of cohesion devices between integrated (source-based) writing and independent writing samples. Cohesion indices were measured using an automated textual analysis tool, the…

Grammatical and lexical cohesion are necessary conditions to guarantee a text's coherence (Halliday and Hasan 1976). Grammatical cohesion is classified into four types of relation: reference, conjunction, substitution, and ellipsis. This study aims to investigate the use of the cohesive device of reference in written discourse produced by…

The continuation task, a new form of reading-writing integrated task in which test-takers read an incomplete story and then write the continuation and ending of the story, has been increasingly used in writing assessment, especially in China. However, language-test developers' understanding of the effects of important task-related factors on…

The present study examines the linguistic expression of causal relations between the motion events within the main episode in a picture-based narrative. One hundred and fifty children aged 5-7 were asked to narrate a story based on a series of pictures: 45 Hebrew monolinguals (19 with Developmental Language Disorders [DLD]), 57 English-Hebrew…

Since Ure (1971) and Halliday (1985), different measures have been proposed in the research literature as a proxy for investigating lexicon advances. They are called lexical richness measures and are an important tool in assessing advance of the lexicon (Johansson, 2009). This article evaluates three lexical richness measures of progress in the…

The current study examined the effects of text-based relational (i.e., cohesion), propositional-specific (i.e., lexical), and syntactic features in a source text on subsequent integration of the source text in spoken responses. It further investigated the effects of word integration on human ratings of speaking performance while taking into…

This study investigates the potential for linguistic microfeatures related to length, complexity, cohesion, relevance, topic, and rhetorical style to predict L2 writing proficiency. Computational indices were calculated by two automated text analysis tools (Coh- Metrix and the Writing Assessment Tool) and used to predict human essay ratings in a…