While the research on pretask planning has concentrated on its effects on learners' task performance in terms of fluency, accuracy, and complexity, its possible influence on the overall discourse level, such as discourse management and coherence, has been largely ignored. The present study addresses the inadequacy by uncovering the potential…

This study aims to investigate the effect of suprasegmental phonological training on connected-text reading comprehension of Chinese university students with different English reading proficiency levels. A sample of 160 freshmen was recruited and randomly divided into experimental and control groups, and the experimental group was given a 12-week…

This study examined the development of text complexity for the past 25 years of reading comprehension passages in the National Matriculation English Test (NMET) in China. Text complexity of 206 reading passages at lexical, syntactic, and discourse levels has been measured longitudinally and compared across the years. The natural language…

As a form of aptitude testing for interpreting, recall across languages has long been considered as a valid means of assessing candidates' linguistic, cognitive and communicative abilities. However, most of the existing research on this topic is only derived from the consensus among or the professional experience of interpreting researchers,…

This study investigates the extent to which microfeatures -- such as basic text features, readability, cohesion, and lexical diversity based on specific word lists -- affect Chinese EFL writing quality. Data analysis was conducted using natural language processing, correlation analysis and stepwise multiple regression analysis on a corpus of 268…