This article describes the problems the author's basic writing students have had in generating ideas for writing in response to timed essay tests. Since many of the common pedagogical approaches for helping students generate or create ideas for writing are ineffective, the author proposes an alternate technique based on the classical notion of the topoi. This ideological system enables students...

Academic self-regulation theories have proposed that learning involves a complex set of cognitive and metacognitive mechanisms that are enacted in phases. These phases include task understanding, strategy adoption, monitoring, and reflection. Whereas classical approaches to self-regulation contend that these phases work together to influence academic performance, the empirical research reported...

In this article, researchers set out to discover the metadiscourse markers in research articles written by both native and non-native English speakers. To this end, a total number of twenty research articles published by Iranian and native English speakers in highly reputed journals on Arts and Humanities domains were randomly selected from major databases including Science Direct, Noormagz, an...

This study reports the development and evaluation of a web-based interactive writing environment designed for elementary school students. The environment includes three writing themes, “story pass on”, “story chameleon” and “thousand ideas”, to encourage reading comprehension, creativity and problem-solving skills of students. Three assessment mechanisms, expert assessment, self-assessment and ...

recent versions of international high-stakes tests like toefl and ielts have made use of integrated tasks in addition to the traditional independent tasks in a claim to provide a more realistic estimation of the test takers’ language abilities. the present study aimed to investigate how test takers’ performance may differ on such tasks. as such, the test takers’ performance was compared on ielt...

This study integrates a larger research empirical project that examines second language (SL) learners’ profiles and valid procedures to perform complete and diagnostic assessment in schools. 102 learners of Portuguese as a SL aged 7 and 17 years speakers of distinct home languages were assessed in several linguistic tasks. In this article, we focused on writing performance in the specific task ...

Students in vocational schools in Greece are less motivated and have low performance in courses demanding academic skills, like language learning with reading and writing tasks (e.g. essay writing). If they were asked, they would say that they prefer to do things rather than study or get involved in traditional classroom language activities. School cannot provide them with language materials an...

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...

There is growing evidence that the lack of competence of university ESL (English as a second language) students in academic writing affects their overall academic performance. Olivas and Li (2006) connected low second-language proficiency levels in English to poor academic performance of international students studying at both university and college levels in the United States. Although, many E...