background : gastrointestinal disorders are common complaints for which endoscopy is one of the most important diagnostic procedures. anxiety is an unpleasant, ambiguous feeling of apprehension and fear of an unknown origin that occurs during anxious and previously stressful situations or during an injury. lack of sufficient information and fear of pain can cause anxiety prior to an endoscopy, ...

It is the consensus among language educators that the objectives of teaching a second/foreign language (L2) put stress on the enhancement of students’ communication skills and advocate the importance of interaction in the classroom. In addition to theories and methods exclusively dedicated to language instruction, the domain-independent inquiry-based teaching, a cognitive approach, can be easil...

The extent to which writing assessment training (WAT) impacts scores has been widely explored in L2 testing contexts. However, little is known of the benefits WAT classroom writing. This paper analyzes impact two sessions on eleven EFL Mexican university teachers. Twenty-two interview transcripts suggested an three main areas: teaching writing, and teacher self-awareness. category self-awarenes...

This study explores the positive learning effect of formulating English sentences via Social Network Service (SNS; Kakao-Talk) on less proficient L2 university students’ (LPSs’) writing, when the application is utilized as a tool to link in and out-of class activities in a multimodal-learning environment. Its objective is also to promote LPSs’ participation in writing activities as well as to r...

An important area of development for second language (L2) students is learning how to share ideas with an audience through writing. Some researchers suggest that writing is a primary language skill that holds greater challenges for L2 learners than speaking, listening, or reading (Bell & Burnaby, 1984; Bialystok, 1978; Brown & Yule, 1983; Nunan, 1989; White, 1981). Writing skills are especially...

Employing an explanatory sequential design, this study investigated the effects of a blog-mediated writing course on L2 students’ writing motivation, self-efficacy, and self-regulation. A number of 46 Iranian EFL learners from 2 intact university classes were recruited as the participants and were randomly assigned into the control group (n = 21) and the experimental group (n ...

The journal article incubator approach to teaching writing skills to researchers and academics involves a series of engaging and inclusive workshops in which best practice writing, reviewing and rewriting skills are modelled by the presenters and practiced by the participants. This paper describes the design and operation of two incubator workshops conducted recently in Australia and South Afri...

In this article, we present an approach to the automatic correction of preposition errors in L2 English. Our system, based on a maximum entropy classifier, achieves average precision of 42% and recall of 35% on this task. The discussion of results obtained on correct and incorrect data aims to establish what characteristics of L2 writing prove particularly problematic in this task.

Linguistic errors are pervasive in second language (L2) students’ writing. Depending on their gravity, the errors may cause a minor degree of irritation to the reader or even lead to total communication breakdown. As such, errors have always been a major concern to both students and teachers, and error correction has also assumed a central position in language teaching. Students generally expec...

This paper reviews models of the cognitive processes involved in writing. It sketches their development from an early emphasis on the thinking behind the text and the impact of cognitive overload on this, through more dynamic models emphasizing the interaction between thinking and text production processes, to more recent models emphasizing the constitutive role of text production in the develo...