The C-Test as a tool for assessing language competence has been in existence for nearly 40 years, having been designed by Professors Klein-Braley and Raatz for implementation in German and English. Much research has been conducted over the ensuing years, particularly in regards to reliability and construct validity, for which it is reported to…

Second language (L2) writing instructors have varying tools at their disposal for providing feedback on students' writing, including ones that enable them to provide written and audio feedback in electronic form. One tool that has been underexplored is Turnitin, a widely used software program that matches electronic text to a wide range of…

With the advances in technology, wordlists retrieved from computer corpora have become increasingly popular in recent years. The lexical items in those wordlists are usually selected, according to a set of robust frequency and dispersion criteria, from large corpora of authentic and naturally occurring language. Corpus wordlists are of great value…

The incidence of plagiarism, according to the literature, is increasing. But why do students plagiarise and why the increase? Is it due to laziness, opportunity, ignorance, fear or ambivalence? Or do they know that there is little chance of any significant penalty? The literature suggests that all of these apply. Given this, are universities and,…

Forms of expression and representation other than writing have unquestionably been revolutionised by developments in new technology and computer software. Digital photography has made it possible to alter and enhance the original image in an almost infinite number of ways. Music software programmes like Cubase and Sibelius make it possible to…

Many excellent corpus-based language learning resources (e.g., concordancers) have been freely available on the Internet for some time. Google assisted language learning (GALL) is also gaining increasing acceptance. These tools are a potential resource for English as an additional language (EAL) university students who want to independently…

This presentation explored the nature of hypertextual or electronically enhanced essays. The purpose of the presentation was to illustrate the change in academic writing which is occurring because of electronic text forms and hyper-linking. The author attempted to show that academic writing (and the culture surrounding writing) is becoming more…

Academic Web publishing is a complex and difficult challenge. It is not surprising that most universities find it necessary to provide different types of Web publishing infrastructures for their constituents, such as conventional, do-it-yourself Web and database services, as well as template-driven solutions that include portals, course management…

Many academics continue to approach the multi-path and multi-voiced capacity of the Internet's networked nodal structure as if it were a book with pages and paragraphs and sentences that flow together in one direction to make a whole. A different approach to that of traditional writing, is required to make effective use of the distinctive…

This article discusses issues in measuring lexical diversity, before outlining an approach based on mathematical modelling that produces a measure, D, designed to address these problems. The procedure for obtaining values for D directly from transcripts using software (vocd) is introduced, and then applied to thirty-two children from the Bristol…

School- and university-based writing tasks make demands on cognitive processing and socio-cultural knowledge that vary with the discipline in which the writing is situated. The variation in socio-cognitive demands makes the use of self-accessed, computer-mediated writing instruction more promising than conventional, teacher-fronted instruction. To…