This paper reports a series of research studies on the use of automated writing evaluation (awe) in secondary and university settings in China. The secondary school study featured the use of awe in six intact classes of 268 senior high school students for one academic year. The university study group comprised 460 students from five universities…

The study examines whether there is any difference between the effects of a reading-writing integrated task and comprehensive corrective feedback (CF) on English as a foreign language (EFL) learners' writing development, and whether the input language in the integrated task makes a difference in L2 writing development over time and the language…

This classroom quasi-experiment aimed to learn if and to what degree supplementing classroom instruction with Rosetta Stone (RS), Tell Me More (TMM), Memrise (MEM), or ESL WOW (WOW) impacted high-stakes English test performance in areas of university-level writing, reading, speaking, listening, and grammar. Seventy-eight (N = 78) Chinese learners…

Whereas there has been some research on the role of bottom-up and top-down processing in the learning of a second or foreign language, very little attention has been given to bottom-up and top-down instructional approaches to language teaching. The research reported here used a quasi-experimental design to assess the relative effectiveness of two…

This study is an attempt to explore the correlation between direct and indirect vocabulary learning strategies along with the depth and breadth of vocabulary knowledge. To this end, a sample of 145 low proficiency students who learn English as a Foreign Language (EFL) completed a questionnaire concerning vocabulary learning strategy use.…

Many empirical studies carried out to test the three major functions of the Comprehensible Output Hypothesis proposed by Swain lend some support to the Hypothesis in one way or another. This study aims to investigate whether giving the Chinese EFL learners an opportunity for oral output encourages them to notice their linguistic problems in oral…

The authors of this article implement a quasi-experimental strategy to estimate peer effects in economic education by exploiting the institutional setting in a large public university in China, where roommates are randomly assigned conditional on a student's major and province of origin. They found significant impacts of peer academic quality,…

The aim of this study was threefold: (1) to further examine the possibility of using literature-based activities to raise EFL students' emotional intelligence (hereafter EI) and (2) to see whether there is any relationship between students' EI and writing achievement, in addition (3) to shed light on the implementation of such activities into the…

This research conducted quasi-experiments in four middle schools to evaluate the long-term effects of an intelligent web-based English instruction system, Computer Simulation in Educational Communication (CSIEC), on students' academic attainment. The analysis of regular examination scores and vocabulary test validates the positive impact of CSIEC,…