ESL learners’ writing as a window onto discourse competence

Assessment of ESL Learners' Syntactic Competence Based on Similarity Measures

This study presents a novel method that measures English language learners’ syntactic competence towards improving automated speech scoring systems. In contrast to most previous studies which focus on the length of production units such as the mean length of clauses, we focused on capturing the differences in the distribution of morpho-syntactic features or grammatical expressions across profic...

Negative Language Transfer Reflected in ESL Learners’ English Writing

Using Coh-Metrix to Analyze Chinese ESL Learners’ Writing

Scoring essays is costly, laborious and time-consuming. Automated scoring of essays is a promising approach to face this challenge. Coh-Metrix is a computer tool that reports on cohesion, sentence complexity, lexical sophistication and other descriptive features at sentenceand paragraph-level. It has been widely used to analyze native English speakers’ essay writing. However, few studies have u...

The Use of Discourse Markers in E.F.L. Learners' Writing

This study investigates the use of discourse markers by Spanish learners of English. It is intended as an initial contribution to the study of how discourse markers are used by foreign language learners. We conduct two pilot studies involving the use of English discourse markers by native speakers of Spanish. We first study if these speakers use English discourse markers at all in their writing...

Grammar, Writing, and Technology: A Sample Technology-supported Approach to Teaching Grammar and Improving Writing for ESL Learners

English language learners are frequently unable to benefit from the prevailing process-writing approaches due to a lack of grammar and vocabulary knowledge relevant to academic writing. This paper describes how the need for explicit grammar instruction as part of preparing students to write can be addressed by using a collection of learner texts and transforming that collection into an online g...