14. DISCOURSE APPROACHES TO WRITING ASSESSMENT

Approaches to teaching writing

The lecturer’s dilemma Iain, a psychology lecturer, became interested in the role of writing in his students’ learning for ‘selfish reasons’. When reading his students’ writing, Iain found it difficult to distinguish between their understanding of the subject matter and their expression of ideas and arguments. This problem drove him to investigate how to improve his students’ academic writing a...

Discourse Community Collocations and L2 Writing Content

Taking the position that writing can be an important skill to foster knowledge building pedagogy, this article explores vocabulary as a supportive tool for this purpose. Having this in mind, a compilation of conceptually loaded vocabularies pertaining to seven discourse communities was developed, two of which were given to a group of L2 writers to investigate the implications of phraseology for...

Computational Approaches to Discourse and Document Processing

This introduction tracks the evolution of the definition and role of discourse issues in NLP from the knowledge-intensive “discourse understanding” methods of the 80’s to the recent concern with “accessing contents” in vast document bases via data-intensive methods. As text/discourse linguistics moves toward corpus approaches, also in connection with the development of large text bases and of c...

14 Genre and Cognitive Development : Beyond Writing to Learn

Diagnosing the Iranian L2 Writing Ability Using Self-Assessment and Level Specific Approaches

The objectives of this study were (a) to examine the writing performance of L2 learners on the level-specific tasks based on Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) and (b) to study the likely difference between students' self-assessed level of writing and those reported by raters. The study was conducted with 138 Iranian students at BA and MA levels in Alborz Institute of Higher Educatio...