The effective use of reporting verbs is an important part of establishing credibility in source-based writing. Although comparative studies of academic writing have shown that the reporting verbs used by novice and expert writers differ by discipline, fewer studies have examined whether such differences exist in English for academic purposes (EAP)…

This paper discusses the impacts of an action research on how students can excel in writing skills regardless of their level of competency especially for those taking the English Language paper (SPM 1119) in the Malaysian Secondary School Public Exam in 2018. This action research aims to exert the need for realigning our focus to incorporate an…

The present study examined issues pertaining to the reliability of writing assessment in the elementary grades, and among samples of struggling and nonstruggling writers. The present study also extended nascent research on the reliability and the practical applications of automated essay scoring (AES) systems in Response to Intervention frameworks…

Despite growing interest in the studies on Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), its operation in the forms of individualized and group-wide has been controversial. To cast some empirical light on the issue, this study was designed to study the applicability of the two scenarios of ZPD-based instructions to the writing accuracy of two levels of…

The problem of poor writing skills at the postsecondary level is a large and troubling one. This study investigated the writing skills of low-skilled adults attending college developmental education courses by determining whether variables from an automated scoring system were predictive of human scores on writing quality rubrics. The human-scored…

Higher education institutions in the United States provide placement essay tests to ensure international students' readiness for college courses. The high-stakes nature of placement tests makes educators and researchers seek significant components of differentiating levels of placement tests. This study investigated the prediction of two levels…

Essay writing is a common type of constructed-response task used frequently in standardized writing assessments. However, the impromptu timed nature of the essay writing tests has drawn increasing criticism for the lack of authenticity for real-world writing in classroom and workplace settings. The goal of this paper is to contribute evidence to a…

The present study seeks to investigate the role of portfolios in EFL (English as a Foreign Language) writers' metacognition as well as their writing skill. Therefore, the participants were assigned to two groups (experimental and control). The students in both groups received a writing test, a researcher-made Metacognitive Writing Questionnaire…

This study examined the progress of English as a foreign language (EFL) writers using the instructional framework of systemic functional linguistics (SFL) and the communities of practice (CoPs) model. The study participants comprised 11 first-year undergraduate students in Japan with intermediate-level English proficiency who were exposed to SFL…

This study investigates the relationship of second language (L2) writing skills proficiency with the first language (L1) writing skills, in light of the language transfer. The study aims to analyze the positive effects of L2 writing proficiency on L1 writing proficiency. Forty native Turkish-speaking university students participated in the study.…

This pilot study identifies some lexical aspects of the emerging writing skills in Spanish among receptive English/Spanish bilingual students with little or no exposure to formal study of the home language upon entering a Spanish Heritage Language Program at a large public university in the Southwestern United States. The 200+ essays analyzed in…

Developed to evaluate secondary school students' writing fluency skills, this study is descriptive in nature and uses a mixed method approach. During the research, the researcher attempted to identify students' abilities to write in terms of quantity and complexity, on the one hand, and also attempted to identify findings on accuracy, the…

Metadiscourse is a prevalent linguistic resource that helps writers to manage the flow of the propositional contents and to direct their stance towards their contents and readers. Its dominance in persuasive writings has motivated this study which is to examine the occurrences and forms of metadiscourse use in the writing of both the high (HEP)…

There is much debate about whether or not these days students should be able to word-process essay-type examinations as opposed to handwriting them, particularly when they are asked to word-process everything else. This study used word-processing software to examine the stylistic features of 13 examination essays written by hand and 24 by…

The purpose of this exploratory study was to develop and test a strategy to support middle grade students' persuasive writing skills. The sample included 52 eighth-grade students who were either proficient or struggling writers. The students were randomly assigned to either receive training on a graphic organizer designed to scaffold effective…