This study examined the effect of the ZPD-based discourse scaffolding on EFL learners' co-construction of L2 metadiscourse performing collaborative writing tasks and explored the discourse scaffolding dynamics. The participants were 160 EFL students that were assigned to four different treatment conditions: (i) formal teaching, (ii) input enhancement, (iii) non-ZPD interaction, and (iv) ZPD-bas...

From May 21 to 24, 2004, I attended the 4th International Conference on ELT in China, held in Beijing. Held concurrently with this conference was the Basic English Education Symposium. Of the nearly 500 presentations and workshops at the conference, 49 were focused on English writing instruction and assessment at the college level, involving both English and non-English majors. Considering the ...

Thematic structure, an important factor for textual metafunction, plays a significant role in inspecting and promoting the textual coherence. With a theoretical statement of Thematic theory and TP patterns, this paper proposes the feasibility of the Thematic Operational Approach in the teaching of college English writing. This approach is proved to not only strengthen students’ application awar...

there is insufficient rigorous research examining which features of efl/esl learners’ writing can be improved through their awareness/knowledge of collocation. this study, therefore, addressed this issue and examined the effect of this awareness on iranian efl learners’ writing performance with respect to the specific features of each writing sub-component (i.e., content, organization, vocabula...

Research on teaching writing in Arabic as a less commonly taught language is still in its infancy. Motivated by the dearth of research on the integration of the genre-based approach into teaching writing in Arabic and the absence of such an approach, this paper proposes a genre-based framework for teaching writing in Arabic. Building on conclusions drawn from recent research, it proposes four s...

This paper is a part of a larger study that examines the development of students' English writing skills during the transition from school education to higher education in Syria, where English is a foreign language. The main objective of this paper is exploring teaching practices affect students transition from one level to the next via obtaining students' perceptions about writing, challenges ...