Grounded in the cross-linguistic influence(s) (CLI) literature, this study used objective measures to compare the use of English, lexical richness and syntactic complexity, and grammatical accuracy and fluency in the texts of three groups of Grade 6 French immersion students: Canadian-born anglophones (C-A), Canadian-born multilinguals (C-M), and…

Boosters are an important metadiscourse device for writers because it creates an emphatic impression in the reader. In addition, the competence of metadiscourse devices such as boosters is crucial in having native-fluency in academic writing. Therefore, this avoidance of using boosters may spawn foreignness in non-native writers' academic texts.…

This study explored how an audience-focused writing curriculum mediated the literacy development of bilingual Latina/o first-grade students. Drawing on translingual theories of literacy and scholarship describing the role of audience and audience awareness in skilled writing, this study qualitatively documented and analyzed students' writing and…

This study is an endeavor to find how English native and nonnative EFL/ESL (English as foreign language/English as second language) writers use adversative conjunctions to connect ideas together so that texts have both coherence and cohesion. Regarding the problems nonnative writers of EFL face when composing a piece of writing, we attempted a…

In the past, the ESL/EFL field has intensively explored the effects of L1 to L2, yet overlooked the possible effects of L2 to L1. Hence, this study is an attempt to offer an initial answer as regards the considerable interest in how bilinguals make use of their language repertoires when engaged in an L1 composing task. Four Filipino English…

David Bleich's exploration of language conflicts in the university in "The Materiality of Language: Gender, Politics, and the University" helps explain the ongoing struggle over basic writing as between two radically different understandings of language. Progressive educators and writing teachers see language as rhetorical and…

This classroom study examines whether English L2 writers' language use differs depending on the writing task (operationalized as paragraph type), and task conditions (operationalized as individual or collaborative writing). The texts written by English L2 university students in Colombia (N = 26) in response to problem/solution and cause/effect…

Formality has long been of interest in the study of discourse, with periodic discussions of the best measure of formality and the relationship between formality and text categories. In this research, we explored what features predict formality as humans perceive the construct. We categorized a corpus consisting of 1,158 discourse samples published…

In light of the current assaults on Black girls and misaligned instructional practices in and outside of schools across the nation, English educators need to understand a more complete vision of the identities girls create for themselves, and the literacies and practices needed to best teach them. This article provides a review of literature of…

In an attempt to survive in the highly competitive terrain of academic publications, Portuguese humanities and social science professors are increasingly giving up writing their papers in Portuguese, and, instead, they now opt to write in English, today's scientific default language. This paper aims to portray the current panorama of humanities…

To help EFL learners realize the use of nominals and clauses in practicing productive skills of academic writing in English writing tests, experiments have been exploited using the tasks similar to those of internet-based test of English as a foreign language to determine the nominal and clause level information during sentence and paragraph…

As part of a larger research study, this paper describes calculus students' reasoning about the Intermediate Value Theorem (IVT) in verbal, written, and graphical form. During interviews, students were asked to verbally describe the IVT in their own words. They then provided written descriptions, watched video of their verbal descriptions,…

Highly explicit language use is prized in scientific discourse, and greater explicitness is hypothesized to facilitate academic achievement. Studies in the mid-twentieth century reported controversial findings that the explicitness of text differs by the income and education levels of authors' families. If income-related differences in…

This paper describes an exploratory trial conducted with 14-15 year-old students in English state schools who were studying business start-ups as part of a course in "Business Studies". The intervention uses a "Story Grammar" strategy to improve students' reasoning by increasing the frequency and complexity of their use of…

A corpus of 313 freshman college essays was analyzed in order to better understand the forms and functions of humor in academic writing. Human ratings of humor and wordplay were statistically aggregated using Factor Analysis to provide an overall "Humor" component score for each essay in the corpus. In addition, the essays were also…