Scientific misconceptions are ubiquitous, and in our era of near-instant information exchange, this can be problematic for both public health and the public understanding of scientific topics. Refutation text is one instructional tool for addressing misconceptions and is simple to implement at little cost. We conducted a random-effects…

Research on academic stance and evaluation has been prolific over the past few decades. Few studies, however, have focused on exploring the evaluative potential of that-constructions in shaping the structure of academic arguments. To address this lacuna, the current study aimed at exploring the potential impact of the distinct communicative…

Textual coherence is an important part of writing. This study examines whether textual coherence affects the quality of argumentative essays by evaluating papers written by 22 EFL university students. Firstly, the argumentative essays were evaluated by two raters using an AP English Argumentative Writing rubric available on Turnitin, an online…

English is a demanding language for EFL students especially ones without access to additional support like tutorials, extra classes, and opportunities to use English in their daily lives. Scaffolding the writing process for students and making automatic use of genre knowledge would help them improve their English writing performance. Little is…

Background: Writing is an important and complex skill, which could be enhanced by teaching students effective writing strategies such as outlining. Electronic outlining - integrated feature in Microsoft® Word -- has been shown to enhance students' writing performance. However, little is known about the optimal didactic approach for electronic…

This study evaluated the construct validity of six scoring traits of an automated writing evaluation (AWE) system called "MI Write." Persuasive essays (N = 100) written by students in grades 7 and 8 were randomized at the sentence-level using a script written with Python's NLTK module. Each persuasive essay was randomized 30 times (n =…

The purpose of the study is to determine pre-service Turkish language teachers' use of text structure elements and their awareness and experience with argumentative writing. The research was designed as a case study, which included 115 undergraduate students studying Turkish language teaching. The data of the study consisted of the participants'…

Deception is a misrepresentation of reality that attracted many researchers examining it from various perspectives. However, no due attention has been given to the discursive deception strategies in the work of think tanks. This study aims at exposing the deception strategies deployed in the conservative American think tanks' discourse which…

Despite previous research suggesting that first language (L1) use fulfills important functions in collaborative writing (CW) tasks, research has yet to examine whether L1 or second language (L2) use may lead to variation in the lexico-grammatical aspects of learners' collaborative texts and the pair talk. Using a corpus-based approach, this study…