L2 Theme development in Discursive and Experimental undergraduate student writing

The Impact of Teaching Developmental Grammatical Errors on Iranian Undergraduate Translator Trainees’ L2 Paragraph Writing Ability

This study aimed to investigate the impact of teaching developmental grammatical errors on translator trainees’ L2 paragraph writing ability. After administration of Oxford Placement Test (OPT), 40 out of 100 undergraduate translator trainees were selected from the Islamic Azad University of Tonekabon branch. Further, the participants were divided into an experimental and a control groups...

Does writing development equal writing quality? A computational investigation of syntactic complexity in L2 learners

This study examines second language (L2) syntactic development in conjunction with the effects such development has on human judgments of writing quality (i.e., judgments of both overall writing proficiency and more fine-grained judgments of syntactic proficiency). Essays collected from 57 L2 learners in a longitudinal study were analyzed for growth and scoring patterns using syntactic complexi...

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...

The Effect of Collaborative Prewriting Discussions on L2 Writing Development and Learners’ Identity Construction

The current study investigated the effect of collaborative prewriting activities on learners’ identity construction and L2 writing development. To this end, 43 sophomore upper-intermediate university students majoring in Teaching English as a Foreign Language at an Iranian university who had enrolled in a course called Advanced Writing were randomly divided into two experimental groups (g...

Section V: Student Development: Intellectual Growth and Writing