This study aimed at investigating the potential of collaborative and e-collaborative writing modalities in developing interactional complexity, utilization of interactional demonstrators and density of interaction. To this end, 66 Iranian intermediate female English as foreign language learners (EFL) were selected to participate in this study according to their scores on Oxford Placement Test (...

Four groups of children in first grade were compared on early literacy tasks. Children in three of the groups were bilingual, each group representing a different combination of language and writing system, and children in the fourth group were monolingual speakers of English. All the bilingual children used both languages daily and were learning to read in both languages. The children solved de...

The present research study aimed to explore covert processes of editing and revision which were involved in writing four different academic text genres (i.e. abstract, conclusion, data commentary, and cover letter) in English language. To this end, six EFL learners with Persian as their mother were recruited to participate in this study. All the participants attended an induction session and ea...

Lexical sophistication is an important component of writing proficiency. New lexical indices related to range, n-gram frequency, psycholinguistic word information, academic language, polysemy, and hypernymy have yielded new insights into the construct of lexical sophistication and its relationship with second language (L2) acquisition and writing. For example, recent studies have suggested that...

The purpose of this study was to examine which emergent literacy skills contribute to preschool children's emergent writing (name-writing, letter-writing, and spelling) skills. Emergent reading and writing tasks were administered to 296 preschool children aged 4-5 years. Print knowledge and letter-writing skills made positive contributions to name writing; whereas alphabet knowledge, print know...

Using optical topography (near-infrared spectroscopy: NIRS), relative changes in oxidized hemoglobin (oxy-Hb) were measured before and after the introduction of Role lettering. Tasks performed during measurements included antegrade (from the subject to other persons) and retrograde (from other persons to the subject) mental imaging and writing tasks. All subjects were junior high school student...

Argument maps as schematic representations of arguments and their logical and evidential relationships are effective diagrams for instruction in education as well as in L2 development. However, their use for teaching L2 writing in EFL contexts has not been adequately studied. Therefore, this study investigated the effect of argument mapping instruction on Iranian EFL learners’ writing achieveme...

PURPOSE To investigate near-vision posture in Chinese myopic schoolchildren and compare near-vision posture during different near-vision tasks (i.e., playing video games, reading, and writing). METHODS The study investigated 120 myopic children (grades 1 through 6 and aged 6 to 13 years). An electromagnetic motion-tracking system was used for continuous measurements of the working distance an...