To writing anything on a keyboard at all requires us to know first what to type, then to activate motor programmes for finger movements, and execute these. An interruption in the information flow at any of these stages leads to disfluencies. To capture this combination of fluent typing and typing hesitations, researchers calculate different…

The demands of learning in the twenty-first century require being skilled in the use and comprehension of multiple documents. Some individual factors such as the metacognitive skill of theory of mind (ToM) are related to this ability. This study investigated the relationship between university students' ability to comprehend multiple documents,…

To investigate how task complexity cognitive factors influence the lexical complexity in essay writing, this study was guided by Robinson's Cognition Hypothesis (CH) and Skehan's Limited Attentional Capacity Model (LACM), and examined the effects of task complexity on lexical complexity in undergraduates' essay writing. Using Lu's Lexical…

Task-based language teaching (TBLT) has occupied an important place in the field of language education; however, some of TBLT dimensions that pertain to the interaction between task design features, written corrective feedback (WCF), and learners' performance have not received adequate attention in past studies. To fill this gap, the current study…

Syntactic complexity has long been used to gauge language learners' performance, proficiency, and development, offering language teachers valid recommendations for syllabus design and materials development. Progress in syntactic complexity research foreshadows the imperative of measuring syntactic features at a high level of granularity, which…

This study explored the relationship between task complexity, textual emotionality, and linguistic complexity in second language (L2) writing. Fifty-eight L2 English learners performed simple and complex versions of an argumentative writing task manipulated along with resource-­directing variables. The essays were first analysed for textual…

Task design has been viewed to be essential in the context of language assessment. This study investigated whether increasing task complexity affects learners' writing performance. It employs three writing tasks with different levels of complexity based on Robinson's Componential Framework. A cohort of 278 participants was selected using a simple…

Although digital multimodal composing (DMC) is receiving increasing attention in language classrooms, the extent to which it contributes to students' writing practices is controversial. In order to understand the affordances of DMC compared to traditional monomodal writing in school contexts, it is pertinent to compare DMC and traditional writing…

This study investigates task-specific emotions, examining how they arise and impact performance in a second language writing task through the lens of control-value theory and a positive psychology (PP) perspective. Participants were 206 secondary English-as-a-foreign-language learners from rural China. They completed an English argumentative…

This study examines how the genre of input text influences Chinese young EFL learners' performance on continuation tasks. Participants were 30 students in Grade 9 and repeated-measures design was adopted to compare their performance on narrative and argumentative continuation tasks, in terms of writing quality, CAF indicators as well as alignment.…

To test the predictive power of the SSARC (stabilize, simplify, automatize, reconstruct, and complexify) model of pedagogic task sequencing in second language (L2) writing development, the present study explores the performance of written decision-making tasks with varied levels of cognitive complexity in a simple-to-complex sequence in comparison…

Digital multimodal composing (DMC) has attracted language instructors' and researchers' increasing attention during recent years. Previous studies mainly investigated the students' DMC processes and perceptions, but DMC products are underexamined, and in particular, scarce is research comparing collaborative DMC products and individual DMC…

Grounded in the activity theory, we adopted a sequential explanatory mixed-methods approach to explore the impact of automated written corrective feedback (AWCF) on English as a foreign language (EFL) learners' academic writing skills (i.e. task achievement, coherence and cohesion, lexicon, and grammatical range and accuracy). To this end, two…

This paper analyzes writing tasks in academic writing textbooks for Japanese university students, focusing on the organization and difficulty of these tasks based on the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR). A total of 411 writing tasks from 30 textbooks were coded by two experienced Japanese English teachers. The author…

The present paper provides an overview of an online module for formative assessment of summary writing skills for second language (L2) introductory academic writing instruction in Japan and presents initial empirical results on how Japanese undergraduate students' summary writing performance changed with a series of automated summary content…