The present study examines the ways Chinese high school EFL learners organize information in their writing. A class of 50 students at grade 9 from a local high school in Guangzhou, China, were recruited as participants. The students' writing at grade 9 was collected as a corpus, comprising ten writing tasks from different text types. In order to…

The role of context in cloze tests has long been seen as both a benefit as well as a complication in their usefulness as a measure of second language comprehension (Brown, 2013). Passage cohesion, in particular, would seem to have a relevant and important effect on the degree to which cloze items function and the interpretability of performances…

We examined spelling errors patterns, cohesive ties, and syntax features in English and Spanish essays written by Spanish-English emergent bilinguals in Grades 1, 2, and 3 (N = 278; 51% female) enrolled in either English immersion or English-Spanish dual immersion programs. In Study 1, we addressed whether students made consistent spelling errors…

This study explored rhetorical devices and their effect on forming coherent and cohesive wholes in the writing of 61 EFL students. When analyzing their writing using the five-paragraph essay format, 57% of students deviated from the format, with some resorting to their L1 rhetorical structures (the indirect group) and others employing rhetorical…

Connected speech produced by native speakers poses a challenge to second language learners. Video subtitles have been found to assist the decoding of English connected speech for learners of English as a foreign language (EFL). However, the presence of subtitles may divert the listeners' attention to the visual cues while paying less attention to…

This paper employs narrative discourse analysis to analyze Edger Allen Poe's short story "The Tell-Tale Heart" by using two narrative analysis frameworks that focus on the macrostructure (Stein, 1982) and microstructure (Halliday & Hasan, 1976) aspects of the story. The analysis covers the story's purpose, generic structure, and…

Metadiscourse, a linguistic means that is used in the production and organization of ideas, is vital in achieving successful communication. In language studies, metadiscourse in writing and speaking have been disparately investigated, where the former received more attention than the latter. Thus, the present study analyzes metadiscourse in the…

The reader's ability to connect new information to existing knowledge is crucial when reading a text. Nonetheless, text complexity, in many ways, is more linguistic than cognitive. It encompasses the degree of sophistication, and how challenging a reading section is. Depending on the section, such difficulty may appear on the vocabulary level, in…

The purpose of the current study is to explore the potential impact of a goal-based writing program on EFL students' writing competence and their attitudes toward goal-setting activities. The goal-based writing program was developed within goal-setting theory and launched in a writing class of 39 EFL Vietnamese university students over ten weeks.…

English as Foreign Language (EFL) writing is challenging for students due to the lack of related lexical resources to inspire them for meaningful writing besides grammar feedback. Moreover, it is crucial to design personalized feedback based on students' original writings in helping to improve their writing abilities. Therefore, we developed Smart…

Thematic progression can be applied as one of the techniques to analyse whether the paragraphs written are coherent or not. To this end, the present study scrutinized six English final reports written by the sixth semester students learning at an academy of secretary in Indonesia. The data originated from the six final reports were identified,…

This study has been conducted to evaluate transition marker (TM) types in the MA theses written by the native speakers (NSs) of English and Turkish speakers (TSs) of English. The purpose is to compare the most salient transition types of the NSs and TSs randomly selected theses introduction, results and discussion, and conclusion sections in the…

Assessing student writing is a complex task and experimental studies have shown that textual determinants, such as spelling or vocabulary, affect teachers' judgments of other analytic criteria in student essays. Among these elements, organisation has not been extensively explored. This experimental study examines how organisational quality…

The use of appropriate rhetorical moves (RMs) and meta-discourse markers (MMs) improve the argumentative and persuasive force of academic texts, such as essays, thesis, seminar papers, and articles. However, authors from different language backgrounds and levels of expertise may use different RMs and MMs when writing in a foreign language. This…

The main purpose of this paper is the functional analysis and argumentation of text connectors as tools for implementation of the textual connectivity not only in the local but also global context. Given the comparative nature of this paper, we will be comparing typology and relationships expressed by the connectors in some of the argumentative…