This study describes academic literacy development during mid-adolescence, when learners need to adjust to the demands of academic discourse as a gateway to linguistic adulthood. Unlike most research to date, which is cross-sectional and detached from disciplinary content, this study provides a two-year longitudinal description of academic…

The present study attempts to identify difficulties that Japanese students encounter with metadiscursive nouns in writing second language (L2) argumentation essays. Metadiscursive nouns are abstract and unspecific nouns which can serve as cohesive markers by retrieving their meanings in the text where they occur. Using a selected number of nouns…

This mixed-methods study explored the effects of employing a genre-based approach (GBA) to descriptive report writing on the understanding of text structure and ideational, interpersonal and textual meanings among Japanese university students of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) over a 15-week course divided into three units. Applied within a…

This paper examines the effects of attended and unattended demonstratives on text processing, comprehension, and writing quality in two studies. In the first study, participants (n = 45) read 64 mini-stories in a self-paced reading task and identified the main referent in the clauses. The sentences varied in the type of demonstratives (i.e., this,…

This empirical study attempts to examine the use of cohesive devices in the written discourse of EFL undergraduate students and seeks to find how the use of incorrect and repetitive cohesive ties affects the effectiveness of academic writing. Halliday and Hasan's (1976) list of cohesive devices was employed to analyze the cohesion in the…

Writing is a complex skill and one of the most difficult to master. A teacher's weak writing skills may negatively influence their students. Therefore, reinforcing teacher education by first determining pre-service teachers' writing weaknesses is imperative. This mixed-methods error analysis study aims to examine the cohesive errors in the writing…