With the incremental integration of technology in writing assessment, technology-generated feedback has found its way to take further steps toward replacing human corrective feedback and rating. Yet, further investigation is deemed necessary regarding its potential use either as a supplement to or replacement for human feedback. This study aims to…

A compelling body of evidence suggests that EFL students have problem with logical connectors' appropriate use in writing. This study explored Iranian EFL students' adversative connectors use in their essay writing course. To this end, a Learner Corpus of 60393 words consisting of 156 essays was compiled. LOCNESS was chosen as the criterion…

The present study aimed at investigating whether academic IELTS candidates perform differently in writing on either a chart topic or a table topic of the IELTS writing task 1 with regard to the four IELTS writing marking criteria i.e. task achievement, coherence and cohesion, lexical resource, and grammar range and accuracy. The study adopted a…

This study aimed at comparing two types of IELTS writing task 1 namely, bar charts and tables of Iranian test takers in terms of four IELTS writing assessment criteria including task achievement, coherence and cohesion, lexical resource, and grammar range and accuracy. The study also sought to identify test takers' strengths and weaknesses in the…

Amongst extensive research on thesis writing quality, few provide a detailed account of common writing challenges/errors as perceived by examiners vs. students. In this study, eight recent English theses marked-up by examiners and defended in Iranian universities were selected randomly among those thesis made available (n=45). Based on an…

Drawing on Vygotskian sociocultural theory of mind and social constructivism, and adopting a sequential exploratory mixed-methods approach, this study explored the impact of online dynamic assessment (DA) on EFL learners' academic writing skills through one-on-one individual and online synchronous DA sessions over Google Docs. It also investigated…

The aim of this study was to investigate discourse markers in descriptive compositions of 90 Iranian students who were selected from two universities. Without any instruction, they were given a topic to write a descriptive composition per week for 8 weeks. 598 compositions were collected, and they were analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively by…