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...

this study investigated the effects of two types of written feedback – direct corrective feedback (dcf) and metalinguistic explanation (me) - on iranian efl learners’ implicit and explicit knowledge of english definite and indefinite articles. assigned to three groups of dcf, me, and control groups, the participants took four tests in three testing phases: pretest, posttest, and delayed posttes...

The longitudinal effects of repeating a timed classroom writing activity on the EFL (English as a Foreign Language) student’s L2 (second language) writing development were investigated. Data for 46 students were collected 30 times over one year. The students’ compositions were analyzed for fluency and for grammatical and lexical complexity. Text analysis using Coh Metrix and visual analysis of ...

Abstract The present study was an attempt to investigate the relationship between EFL learners’ anxiety and writing complexity. For the purpose of the study, 70 female learners, between 17 and 24 years old (mean=20) from Najm language school in Tehran participated in the study. The participants’ level of anxiety was measured using Horwitz, Horwitz, and Cope’s Anxiety Questionnaire (1986) and th...

Abstract The present study was an attempt to investigate the relationship between EFL learners’ anxiety and writing complexity. For the purpose of the study, 70 female learners, between 17 and 24 years old (mean=20) from Najm language school in Tehran participated in the study. The participants’ level of anxiety was measured using Horwitz, Horwitz, and Cope’s Anxiety Questionnaire (1986) and th...

One of the distinguishing features of advanced-level L2 learners is that they can “direct their writing to specific audiences, and they demonstrate an ability to alter style, tone, and format according to the specific requirements of the discourse” (American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, 2001, p. 2) and use “language flexibly and effectively for social purposes, including emotio...

This study used a new computational linguistics tool, the Coh-Metrix, to investigate and measure the differences in cohesion and lexical network density between native speaker and non-native speaker writing, as well as to investigate L2 proficiency level differences in cohesion and lexical network density. This study analyzed data from three corpora with the Coh-Metrix: the International Corpus...

Lewis (1993) recognized significance of word combinations including collocations by presenting lexical approach. Because of the crucial role of collocation in vocabulary acquisition, this research set out to evaluate the rate of collocations in Iranian EFL learners' writing production across L1 and L2. In addition, L1 interference with L2 collocational use in the learner' writing samples was st...