Written assignments are, perhaps, one of the most common types of coursework that students will encounter in their undergraduate studies. This study describes the communicative purpose and textual and linguistic characteristics of university assignments written for content classes, taking into account variation across communicative text types and…

The research purpose was to identify (1) the problems encountered by academic and administrative staff in emails received from students, (2) positive and negative qualities of the authentic emails of higher education students, (3) functional explanations of the academic email, (4) the problems encountered by students in emails received from…

Mastering analytical writing involves the proficient use of varied later-acquired grammatical, lexical and discourse forms and functions. Developmental studies have identified specific linguistic features as diagnostic of increasing proficiency. This study examines how these features change throughout educational levels and before and after the…

A novel instrument, the Features of Excellent Arguments task (FEXA), was developed to elicit adolescents' judgments about argumentative essays displaying to varying degrees features characteristic of strong persuasive writing: academic language, rich evidence, multiple perspectives, and rhetorical appeal. We collected students' categorical choices…

Verb use and the production of verb argument structure in the written texts of children in elementary school is a key stepping stone towards academic writing success that has remained relatively unexplored and is a notable gap in our understanding of writing development. To evaluate the role of verbs in the written narrative texts of children, we…

The development of an appropriate authorial voice is considered to be fundamental to successful academic writing in the target language. Voice research in second language (L2) writing, therefore, seeks to delineate voice salience in L2 academic texts, the relationship between voice and high quality academic writing, the second language writer's…