This study investigates the effectiveness of writing instruction within the Saudi EFL context, and its alignment with students' future needs and Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030 goals. Two schools located in two different regions with different disciplinary foci were selected for this study. Three study tools were identified to assess the writing…

The current study examined Thai EFL Mattayom learners' pragmatic discourse of givenness via A-movement constructions. While previous studies focused on Thai undergraduate students and their error production in passive voice, this study innovatively contributes to the field by selecting a different group of participants. The participants in this…

Although many studies modelled writing quality by analysing basic skills (spelling, grammar, etc.), few focused on top-down compositional strategies at the discourse level. We propose that using both narrative and argument discourse modes in an argumentative essay (a multi-discourse mode [MDM] strategy) capitalizes on their complementary…

E-learning systems are transforming the educational sector and making education more affordable and accessible. Recently, many e-learning systems have been equipped with advanced technologies that facilitate the roles of educators and increase the efficiency of teaching and learning. One such technology is Automatic Essay Grading (AEG) or…

This research aims to investigate the effects of two teaching sequences -- interleaving and blocking -- on the participants' use of three types of cohesive devices (conjunctions, conjunctive adverbs and prepositions [thereafter CCPs]) in their argumentative essays. The participants included 50 native Cantonese-speaking university students taking…

In most academic writing programs worldwide, instruction aims to develop students' awareness of essay types, written language use, and test-taking strategies. However, teachers' instructional practice is often dictated by their knowledge base, perception, and the intuitions they have about language use (Borg, 2006). Such intuitions are not always…

This randomized controlled trial with first- and second-grade students is the first experimental study addressing long-running disagreements about whether primary grade students should develop transcription and oral language abilities before learning to compose. It is also the first study at these grade levels to teach close reading (using science…

The current study aimed to investigate the tendency to use temporal markers (TMs) in English writing by three different levels of Thai writers. Data used in this study were based on the Corpus of Thai Writers of English. The corpus size of approximately 8,800,000 words consisted of essay writing produced by intermediate and advanced student…

Linguistic complexity serves as an important measure of second language (L2) writing development. Complexity indices, however, rarely feature in the studies of learner languages other than English. Additionally, L2 writing studies have been criticized for the lack of consistency in defining proficiency. The current study addresses these gaps by…

The present paper explores the use of connectives in the persuasive discourse of 30 Tunisian third-year English majors and 30 Tunisian third-year Arabic majors. The study aims to look at the potential impact of Arabic rhetoric on Tunisians' EFL writing. A quantitative analysis of the students' Arabic and English essays on the same argumentative…