We introduce a corpus of science journalism articles, categorized in three levels of writing quality.1 The corpus fulfills a glaring need for realistic data on which applications concerned with predicting text quality can be developed and evaluated. In this article we describe how we identified, guided by the judgements of renowned journalists, samples of excellent, very good and typical writin...

Academic writing, including in English as an Academic Lingua Franca, has become a central feature for the majority of European university students. Despite a large body of research, we find that conceptualisations of student writing still tend to assume a direct link to expert academic genres, which are often explicitly evoked as models. Within a genre analytic paradigm, however, the importance...

This study investigates the validity of a writing model proposed as the underlying structure of the writing skill in English as a foreign language (EFL). Four writing prompts were administered to 178 Iranian EFL learners. The scripts were then scored according to writing benchmarks similar to the IELTS Writing criteria but narrower in scope. After interand intra-rater reliability analysis, a th...

a number of pedagogical arguments support self- and peer-assessment in language classrooms to improve the quality of learning by students’ involvement in the final judgments of one’s work. considering editing as a method of communicative testing of writing, this study aimed at finding out whether self- and peer-editing of assignments could result in the improvement in iranian efl students’ writ...

In the ESP tradition, genre is often defined as “structured communicative events engaged in by specific discourse communities whose members share broad communicative purposes.” ESP genre research has generated numerous descriptions and explanations of discipline-specific genre exemplars and has produced various pedagogical proposals. However, what learners learn from these genre descriptions an...

Cohesive frames are linguistic elements that precede the grammatical subject in the main clause. This study investigated the frequencies and communicative purposes of cohesive frame types in results and discussion section of research articles from 4 disciplines. To run this study, 40 results and discussion sections of research articles were selected from 4 disciplines, namely Applied Linguistic...