During the 2011-2012 academic year, Texas public schools began administering the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STAAR) in grades 3-8, replacing the old testing system, the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS). The TAKS-STAAR transition is a unique contextual backdrop for studying the role of state-mandated reading and…

This paper reports the findings of an action research that was carried out to measure the effectiveness of integrating a social networking website "Edmodo" in students' writing performance in an EFL classroom at Arab Open University (Oman Branch). The participants were 25 students studying English in the Foundation Programme. Along with…

Motivational regulation has long been recognized as an essential but insufficiently investigated aspect of self-regulated learning (SRL), especially in relation to learning English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) writing. This study intends to fill the gap by investigating the predictive effect of motivational regulation strategies on EFL students'…

This study investigates the extent to which microfeatures -- such as basic text features, readability, cohesion, and lexical diversity based on specific word lists -- affect Chinese EFL writing quality. Data analysis was conducted using natural language processing, correlation analysis and stepwise multiple regression analysis on a corpus of 268…

Language proficiency is highlighted in the literature on the adjustment and security of international students. India is the second top source country for mobile students globally, but few studies have focused explicitly on students from India. The purpose of this study was to examine the English language experiences of Indian students at New…

This study aimed to enhance our knowledge of the constituent variables affecting invented writing skills in 5-year-olds by investigating the concurrent relationships among home literacy, underlying language skills, and invented writing. The study comprised 111 Norwegian-speaking children (mean age: 5.7 years; 58 girls) and their parents. The…

This study aims to explore the potential use of sentence tree-structure in English grammar teaching in college. After combining Schema Theory and Lexical Chunk Theory, the writer proposed the sentence tree-structure tool and tried to apply it in one of her grammar classes in college. During the teaching process, students were asked to analyze long…

Investigating the comparability of students' performance on TOEFL writing tasks and actual academic writing tasks is essential to provide backing for the extrapolation inference in the TOEFL validity argument (Chapelle, Enright, & Jamieson, 2008). This study compared 103 international non-native-English-speaking undergraduate students'…

This study aimed to investigate how Grade 1-2 English language learners (ELLs) differ in their performance on a writing test in two test modes: paper and online. Participants were 139 ELLs in the United States. They completed three writing tasks, representing three test modes: (1) a paper in which students completed their writing using a…

This study had two purposes: examining the internal structure of the "Test Estandarizado para la Evaluación Inicial de la Escritura con Teclado" (TEVET; Spanish Keyboarding Writing Test), and analyzing the development of keyboarding skills in Spanish elementary school children with and without learning disabilities (LD) in writing. A…

Previous research in second language writing has shown that when scoring performance assessments even trained raters can exhibit significant differences in severity. When raters disagree, using discussion to try to reach a consensus is one popular form of score resolution, particularly in contexts with limited resources, as it does not require…

Curriculum-based measures (CBMs) are necessary for educators to quickly assess student skill levels and monitor progress. This study examined the use of the alphabet writing fluency task, a CBM of writing, to assess handwriting fluency--that is, how well children access, retrieve, and write letter forms automatically. In the current study, the…

Curriculum-based measures (CBMs) are necessary for educators to quickly assess student skill levels and monitor progress. This study examined the use of the alphabet writing fluency task, a CBM of writing, to assess handwriting fluency--that is, how well children access, retrieve, and write letter forms automatically. In the current study, the…

This study used eye-tracking, in combination with stimulated recalls and reflective journals, to investigate L2 learners' engagement with automated feedback and the impact of feedback explicitness and accuracy on their engagement. Twenty-four Chinese EFL learners revised their writing through Write & Improve with Cambridge, a new automated…

Saudi students encounter many problems in writing skill as several studies revealed (e.g.Alhazmi, 2006; Alsamdani, 2010). Providing effective and useful feedback may help to overcome these challenges. Therefore, this study examines the effect of teachers' written corrective feedback on female Saudi EFL students' written essays and to what extent…