Sleep fosters the generation of explicit knowledge. Whether sleep also benefits implicit intuitive decisions about underlying patterns is unclear. We examined sleep's role in explicit and intuitive semantic coherence judgments. Participants encoded sets of three words and after a sleep or wake period were required to judge the potential…

English language learners seek strong speaking, reading, writing, and listening skills. When it comes to the last it is commonly assumed that if students have many opportunities to hear spoken English then that exposure will improve their ability to comprehend it. Unfortunately, this is often not the case since many second language learners do not…

Standards of coherence are one of the major factors that influence reading comprehension. This study investigated the standards of coherence that second language (L2) learners employ when reading. In a pair of experiments, Japanese learners of English read two-sentence texts with varying causal and semantic relatedness between sentences and then…

Coherence as one of the criteria for textuality is the main element of a well-produced text. In the literature, there are many studies on the classification of coherence relations. Although there are different classifications on coherence relations, similar findings are reported regarding the acquisition order of coherence relations in different…

Previous research has shown that individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) had difficulty integrating narrative information coherently. The majority of these studies focused on people narrating in English; however, little is known about the narrative abilities of Mandarin-speaking individuals with ASD. This study investigates the ability of…

The ability of language-impaired children to maintain coherence by using discourse connectives has so far been assessed by quantitative measures. This study is a first attempt to scrutinize the "quality" of connective use in specific language impairment (SLI). The authors investigate whether Russian-speaking children reveal sensitivity…

This paper explored the effects of the amount of extensive reading (ER) on writing ability. Participants were 157 first and second-year non-English majors at a private university in Japan who took a writing test in class. Some of them were reading extensively, while others had no experience in ER. The outcomes of Pearson's correlation indicated…

To determine the issue of whether there were any significant differences between the groups including Iran ISI, Iran non- ISI, and native authors in binary comparisons as for employing interactional markers, the present study was conducted. To collect the data, 90 "method sections" of English medical research articles within Iranian ISI,…

An experimental design was adopted in the present study to cross-compare the effect of two formative assessments, namely peer assessment (PA) and teacher assessment (TA), with summative assessment (SA) on the improvement of language learners' writing skill and self-efficacy. Writing excellence was operationalized by structural (grammar), lexical…

This study was an attempt to investigate the functional role of textual and interpersonal metadiscourse markers in English and Persian Economic news reports. To this end, 10 news articles, 5 in each language, were randomly selected from the Economic sections of the leading newspapers published in 2013-2014 in Iran and the United States. Based on…

This study investigated the similarities and differences in the use of discourse connectors (DCs) in argumentative essays of American undergraduate students (AMs), Thai with high-English exposure (THHs) and Thai with low-English exposure (THLs). The data of these three groups were collected from 60 essays; 20 essays were from the corpus of…

As part of an intervention project to encourage exploratory talk with young children in mathematics, it was found that, although the children did not engage fully in reasoning, the intervention had supported some children in developing more cohesive discourse. The cohesion was evidenced through the children's use of deictic words, in particular…

This study reports on the insights from an EFL learner corpora (a total of 151 essays and 49,690 words) generated from essays collected over the years in a Turkish state university from freshmen students enrolling in the Advanced Writing course. The comparison of cohesive devices in the non-native corpus (NNC) with those in a native corpus (NC)…

This study used think-aloud protocols to compare essay-rating processes across holistic and analytic rating scales in the context of China's College English Test Band 6 (CET-6). A group of 9 experienced CET-6 raters scored the same batch of 10 CET-6 essays produced in an operational CET-6 administration twice, using both the CET-6 holistic…

Many studies have found EFL/ESL learners over/under/misuse linking adverbials. Because their use is specific to genre and register (Biber et al., 1999), and news writing is a compulsory course for EFL journalism majors at many Chinese universities, this study investigates their usage patterns in news and suggests teaching material design for the…