Broadly defined, academic language (AL) is a set of lexical-grammatical norms and registers commonly used in educational and academic discourse. Mastery of academic language in writing is an important aspect of writing instruction and assessment. The purpose of this study was to use Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools to examine the extent to…

The purpose of the current study was twofold: examining the efficacy of data-driven learning (DDL) (hands-on and hands-off approaches) in the realization of interactional metadiscourse markers (IMMs) among English as a foreign language (EFL) learners and analyzing the learners' perceptions of DDL. The participants consisted of 93 male and female…

We report on a college-level study of student reflection and instructor prompts using scoring and corpus analysis methods. We collected 340 student reflections and 24 faculty prompts. Reflections were scored using trait and holistic scoring and then reflections and faculty prompts were analyzed using Natural Language Processing to identify…

One of the important components in second language (L2) development is to produce clause-level units of form-meaning pairings or argument structure constructions. Based on the usage-based constructionist approach that language development entails an ability to use more diverse, more complex, and less frequent constructions, this study tested…

A perfect writing skill has been deemed instrumental to achieving competence in EFL, yet it is considered one of the most impressive learning domains. This study investigates the impact of human-AI collaborative feedback on the writing proficiency of EFL students. It examines key teaching domains, including the teaching environment, teacher…

Artificial intelligence (AI) for supporting second language (L2) writing processes and practices has garnered increasing interest in recent years, establishing AI-mediated L2 writing as a new norm for many multilingual classrooms. As such, the emergence of AI-mediated technologies has challenged L2 writing instructors and their philosophies…

This study examines the linguistic complexity of Spanish as a second language (L2) in learners' essays across proficiency levels at two timelines of a composition class during a college semester. Data comes from 22 L2 learners of Spanish enrolled in two sections of a third-year composition class at the college level, who were assigned nine…

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…

This paper provides an agenda for replication studies focusing on second language (L2) writing and the use of natural language processing (NLP) tools and machine learning algorithms. Specifically, it introduces a range of the available NLP tools and machine learning algorithms and demonstrates how these could be used to replicate seminal studies…

This study investigates a novel approach to automatically assessing essay quality that combines natural language processing approaches that assess text features with approaches that assess individual differences in writers such as demographic information, standardized test scores, and survey results. The results demonstrate that combining text…

Expressing causal relations plays a central role in academic writing. While it is important that writing instructors assess and provide feedback on learners' causal discourse, it could be a very time-consuming task. In this respect, automated writing evaluation (AWE) tools may be helpful. However, to date, there have been no AWE tools capable of…

This paper reports on the development of a prototype tool which shows how learners can be helped to reflect upon the accuracy of their writing. Analysis of samples of freely written texts by intermediate and advanced learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) showed evidence of weakness in the use of tense and aspect. Computational discourse…