The purpose of this study was to explore the nature of interactions among second/foreign language (L2) writing subskills. Two types of relationships were investigated: subskill-item and subskill-subskill relationships. To achieve the first purpose, using writing data obtained from the writing essays of 500 English as a foreign language (EFL)…

The employment of genre-based pedagogy and Task-Based Language Teaching in second language education is representative of a paradigmatic shift towards a focus on meaning-making. Despite this shift, second language acquisition (SLA) research continues to predominantly rely on complexity, accuracy, and fluency metrics to assess learner production…

Despite previous research suggesting that first language (L1) use fulfills important functions in collaborative writing (CW) tasks, research has yet to examine whether L1 or second language (L2) use may lead to variation in the lexico-grammatical aspects of learners' collaborative texts and the pair talk. Using a corpus-based approach, this study…

Email has become the most preferred form of business communication. Writing "good" email has become an essential skill required in the industry. "Good" email writing not only facilitates clear communication, but also makes a positive impression on the recipient, whether it be one's colleague or a customer. The aim of this paper…

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 Interface Hypothesis (Sorace, 2000) developed in line with the Minimalist theory of grammar (Chomsky, 1995 et seq.) supports the view of L2 acquisition that syntactic properties are acquired early while the acquisition of interface properties is delayed. One of the interface properties is inflectional morphology on English verbs, which…

The notion of "textuality" encouraged Halliday and Hasan in 1976 to present their model of discourse analysis through raising questions about whether "cohesion" was a semantic concept or a structural relation, whether a text was a structural unit or not or even if there were semantic or structural relationships within a text.…

Despite the preponderance of theoretical and empirical evidence that suggests the use of pair/group work to promote second language learning, it is still unclear who can best form high performance groups. Should students be allowed to choose their working partners, or should teachers themselves assign students to pairs? This study set out to…

The educational use of computer-based feedback in the classroom is becoming widespread. However, less is known about (1) the extent to which tools influence how instructors provide written and oral comments, and (2) whether receiving oral or written feedback influences the nature of learners' revisions. This case study, which expands existing…

This research aims to define a sustainable resource in Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL). In order for a CALL resource to be sustainable it must work within existing educational curricula. This feature is a necessary prerequisite of sustainability because, despite the potential for educational change that digitalization has offered since…

Writing an essay is a very important skill for students to master, but a difficult task for them to overcome. It is particularly true for English as Second Language (ESL) students in China. It would be very useful if students could receive timely and effective feedback about their writing. Automatic essay feedback generation is a challenging task,…

Every text has a communicative purpose that it performs by dividing itself into generic stages. These stages are assigned specific goals and have differing linguistic structures. This paper makes an attempt to investigate whether there is a definable co-relation between linguistic features and stages in the genre of look-good advertisements. It…

This article introduces a pedagogical intervention that includes a set of creative activities designed to improve the oral and written production of students in the English classroom, especially those who have shown a lack of interest or attention. It was observed that participants initially seemed careless about studying the language. Eventually…

The current study examined 24 Japanese university students' processes of negotiation in conditions of self revision and of peer revision about their English as a foreign language (EFL) writing. Analyzing their negotiation episodes and text changes, I categorized within a common coding scheme the types of negotiation from (a) think-aloud protocols…

Corpus-based instruction, also referred to as corpus-based linguistics, is essentially the study of genre texts for the production of materials that fit a specific group of second language learners. For example, if a group of students is learning the language in order to read medical articles, a specific teaching program can be set up based on the…