This article studies students' use of sentence variety in an ESL writing course. The study includes three sentence features: (a) sentence types, (b) sentence combining, and (c) sentence patterns. Although sentence variety is part of the curriculum, the actual use of sentence structures has not been measured so far. By understanding students' use…

Being a configuration of logically interconnected statements realized in moves and stages, an argumentative essay is built around the notion of textual unity achieved through lexico-grammar and semantic associations. The study attempted to analyze the role of cohesion in the rhetorical structure of undergraduate EFL students. Hence, the 13 moves…

Discourse competence is an essential component of communicative competence and central to the mastery of academic writing. This article reports a three-tiered diagnostic assessment of two English as a foreign language (EFL) student writers' discourse competence in terms of textual features, composing strategies, and knowledge about academic…

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 study developed a model of linguistic constructs to predict writing quality for college basic writers and analyzed how those constructs changed following instruction. Analysis used a corpus of argumentative essays from a quasi-experimental, instructional study with 252 students (MacArthur, Philippakos, & Ianetta, 2015) that found large…

The purpose of the study was to investigate differences in writers' abilities to perceive global text organisation in self-, peer- and teacher/researcher-authored essays. Eight student participants were identified as proficient, middle or developing, based on the levels of paragraph subordination, the average number of T-Units and the number of…

Cohesion features were calculated for a corpus of 960 essays by 480 test-takers from the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) in order to examine differences in the use of cohesion devices between integrated (source-based) writing and independent writing samples. Cohesion indices were measured using an automated textual analysis tool, the…

This mixed-methods study explored the effects of employing a genre-based approach (GBA) to descriptive report writing on the understanding of text structure and ideational, interpersonal and textual meanings among Japanese university students of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) over a 15-week course divided into three units. Applied within a…

While learners may have access to reference tools during second language (L2) writing, the latest developments in machine translation (MT), such as "Google Translate" requires examination as to how using the tool may factor into the second language learners' writing products. To this end, the purpose of this study was to examine how MT…

Discourse markers improve the quality of writing and increase the comprehension of text. This paper attempts to throw more light in measuring the students' knowledge about Discourse Markers. This paper aims to exponentiate the Discourse Markers in ESL students' essay writing. The Qualitative data was collected from intermediate students of grade 9…

Although Error Analysis (EA) has been broadly used in Foreign Language and Mother Tongue learning contexts, it has not been applied in the field of engineering and by STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) students in a systematic way. In this interdisciplinary pilot study, we applied the EA methodology to a wide corpus of…

Grammatical and lexical cohesion are necessary conditions to guarantee a text's coherence (Halliday and Hasan 1976). Grammatical cohesion is classified into four types of relation: reference, conjunction, substitution, and ellipsis. This study aims to investigate the use of the cohesive device of reference in written discourse produced by…

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 paper examines the effects of attended and unattended demonstratives on text processing, comprehension, and writing quality in two studies. In the first study, participants (n = 45) read 64 mini-stories in a self-paced reading task and identified the main referent in the clauses. The sentences varied in the type of demonstratives (i.e., this,…

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…