students having opportunities to practice, most particularly when they are supported with frequent feedback and are taught strategies for planning, revising, and editing their compositions. Formative systems incorporating automated writing scoring provide the opportunities for students to write, receive feedback, and then revise essays in a timely iterative cycle. This chapter provides an analy...

Alderson (2005) suggests that diagnostic tests should identify strengths and weaknesses in learners' use of language, focus on specific elements rather than global abilities and provide detailed feedback to stakeholders. However, rating scales used in performance assessment have been repeatedly criticized for being imprecise, for using impressionistic terminology (Fulcher, 2003; Upshur & Turner...

this investigation postulatesvygotsky’s (1978) concept of zone of proximal development (zpd) and his related “scaffolding” metaphor as well as norton’s (2006) principles of sociocultural identity as its theoretical foundation.thisresearchintends to scrutinizethe socioculturally-oriented mediationalmechanisms utilized in student-student and student-teacher collaborationsin an iranian efl writing...

Abstract This study was intended to compare collaborative and individual task planning effects on Iranian EFL learners’ writing performance. Therefore, a group of 90 upper intermediate EFL learners were placed in three groups of Collaborative Task planning, Individual Task planning, and Control. In the experimental groups, participants were asked to do task planning collaboratively and individu...

Abstract This study was intended to compare collaborative and individual task planning effects on Iranian EFL learners’ writing performance. Therefore, a group of 90 upper intermediate EFL learners were placed in three groups of Collaborative Task planning, Individual Task planning, and Control. In the experimental groups, participants were asked to do task planning collaboratively and individu...

Despite the role writing plays in learning a foreign language, many students do not show much interest in taking an active part in writing classes (Myint, 1997). Thus different activities have been proposed to motivate students to write one of which is dialogue journal writing, and the present work tries to investigate the possible effect(s) of such activity on writing ability of a group of Eng...

not take the place of a standardized logistic regression coefficient for valuating the strength of the influences of the independent variables on the dependent variable, relative to one another.” The strength of each independent variable cannot be judged based on the magnitude of the OR, so that a larger OR for one independent variable might not have a stronger association than a smaller OR for...

Few medical journals specifically instruct authors to use the active voice and avoid the passive voice, but advice to that effect is common in the large number of stylebooks and blogs aimed at medical and scientific writers. Such advice typically revolves around arguments that the passive voice is less clear, less direct, and less concise than the active voice, that it conceals the identity of ...