This study aimed to analyze common syntactic errors found in the argumentative essays of third-year English major students at the Faculty of Foreign Languages, Van Lang University, Vietnam. Quantitative and qualitative methods were used to obtain data in this study. The quantitative approach involved counting and calculating the frequency,…

Being a configuration of logically interconnected statements realized in moves and stages, an argumentative essay is built around the notion of textual unity achieved through lexico-grammar and semantic associations. The study attempted to analyze the role of cohesion in the rhetorical structure of undergraduate EFL students. Hence, the 13 moves…

Previous corpus research on English for academic purposes (EAP) writing has analyzed how often additional language (L2) writers use words from the Academic Word List (AWL) (Coxhead, 2000), but few studies to date have explored how accurately those words are used. Therefore, the current study investigated how accurately and appropriately EAP…

The article presents the results of a randomized experimental study of a writing curriculum for college developmental writing courses based on strategy instruction with self-regulation integrated with practices common in college composition. Students in a full semester course learned strategies for planning and revising based on rhetorical…

Translators should be able to deliver the intended meaning written in the source language to the target language without changing the purpose of the source text at all (Waldorf: 2013). The initial observation in this study found that most of the beginning translator students in translation class tend to translate without reading the whole text…

Writing as one of essential skills in English learning is attached more and more importance. English writing involves not only the application of lexicon and grammar, but also the construction of the text and the expression of the thought. For Chinese EFL learners, the common problem in English writing is that they tend to apply the Chinese…

This study examined the impact of video-based conversational interaction on the longitudinal development (one academic semester) of second language production by college-level Japanese English-as-a-foreign-language learners. Students in the experimental group engaged in weekly dyadic conversation exchanges with native speakers in the United States…

Prominence, as an important dimension of cognitive construal, refers to the capacity to evoke a certain substructure as the focus of attention, which can be materialized in a variety of semantic and grammatical expressions (Langacker, 1987). Subject of a sentence (Zhang, 2011) and specific sentence structures (Lin, 2013) can bring a substructure…

Writing is a meaning-making process in which a writer deploys lexico-grammar as an interpersonal resource to manage an interplay between self-representation and social dimensions for a credible and persuasive argument. As the first part of an ongoing study, this article proposes a WordPress-based Academic Writing (WAW) instructional model that…

Han's (2009, 2013) selective fossilization hypothesis (SFH) claims that L1 markedness and L2 input robustness determine the fossilizability (and learnability) of an L2 feature. To test the validity of the model, a pseudo-longitudinal study was designed in which the errors in the argumentative essays of 52 Iranian EFL learners were identified and…

Based on Robinson's (2005) Cognition Hypothesis and Skehan and Foster's (2001) Limited Attentional Capacity Model, the current study attempted to investigate the effect of manipulating task complexity on argumentative writing quality in terms of lexical complexity, fluency, grammatical accuracy, and syntactic complexity. Task complexity was…

This study attempts to examine the use of English modals in terms of their frequency and functions. For this purpose, Form 4 and College students' argumentative compositions were extracted from the Malaysian Corpus of Students' Argumentative Writing (MCSAW). In order to analyze the data, this study employed discourse analysis and some descriptive…

This paper reported findings on a contrastive analysis of epistemic expressions in argumentative essays between NS and NNS Chinese L2 writers. Based on an examination of a NS corpus and a NNS learner corpus across four proficiency levels, the study shows there is great similarity in the total number of epistemic devices used per thousand words…

Superlative quantifiers ("at least 3", "at most 3") and comparative quantifiers ("more than 2", "fewer than 4") are traditionally taken to be interdefinable: the received view is that "at least n" and "at most n" are equivalent to "more than n-1" and "fewer than n+1",…

Student academic writing in higher education is a central component of language programs whose purpose is to promote advanced literacy in the target language. At this level, students are required to produce texts that are analytical-argumentative in nature. This type of genre requires writers to formulate an interpretative statement or thesis and…