Teacher trainees are familiarised with various genres during their studies; however, the teaching portfolio and the thesis are the ones in the focus of their university years. The present study aims at investigating student teachers' writing and reflective skills by analysing reflective writings as compulsory documents of teaching portfolios.…

Studies analysing the metatalk generated in collaborative writing (CW) tasks have primarily targeted secondary or adult students who wrote either in L1 or L2, and have seldom examined the process of their writing in two languages. Furthermore, these analyses have mostly focused on accuracy discussions and have ignored discussions aimed at making…

This research aims to investigate the effects of two teaching sequences -- interleaving and blocking -- on the participants' use of three types of cohesive devices (conjunctions, conjunctive adverbs and prepositions [thereafter CCPs]) in their argumentative essays. The participants included 50 native Cantonese-speaking university students taking…

This article reports on a comparative analysis of two sets of essays, student-discursive essays (SDEs) and ChatGPT-generated discursive essays (ChatGPT-GDEs) on the same essay topic using Coh-Metrix. It focused on three Coh-Metrix indices, lexical density, syntactic complexity, and referential cohesion as the basis for the comparative analysis.…

Background: Recent models of writing acknowledge the influential role of motivation in writing development. There has been a paucity of research on writing motivation in children. This study investigated writing motivation among Chinese children with developmental dyslexia. Methods: Forty-one Chinese children with developmental dyslexia (RD) in…

The present study examines the linguistic features of Korean college students' English writings in terms of their writing quality and genre. Forty-eight Korean college students took part in the study, and their writing samples, comprised of narrative and exposition compositions, were collected to analyze on the basis of fluency and syntactic…

Background: Studies have shown that word dictation and syntactic skills are significant predictors of written composition performance among Chinese children in elementary grades. However, there is a paucity of research on the bidirectional relationships between these two cognitive-linguistic skills (i.e., word dictation and syntactic skills) and…

As in teaching other languages, the most difficult of the four basic skills in teaching Turkish as a foreign language is writing; it includes very different strategies from sequencing to analysis and synthesis. In addition, foreign language learners tend to transfer the forms and meanings of their own culture and language to the target language…

Students' writing proficiency is measured through holistic and analytical ratings in writing assessment; however, recent studies suggest that measurement of syntactic complexity in second language writing research has become an effective measure of writing proficiency. Within this paradigm, we investigated how automated measurement of syntactic…

This article describes the lexical and syntactic development of written narratives in 24 deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) students aged between 8 and 18 and takes into account how their varying linguistic backgrounds may predict their written performance. All participants use spoken Swedish, but the study also considers their proficiency in Swedish…

The current study followed literacy skills development amongst 79 Arabic native speaking pupils from kindergarten to fourth grade. Based on reading comprehension attainments in fourth grade, two groups of skilled and poor readers were identified. Poor readers showed significantly lower performance on measures of phonological and morphological…

Based on the quantitative analysis of L2 English texts from Korean undergraduates, the present paper demonstrates the possibility of distinguishing L2 speaking proficiency with differing measures of syntactic complexity in English writing. To this end, 14 measures of complexity were gauged using an L2 Syntactic Analyzer (Lu, 2010) in 89 EFL essays…

Writing native-like has always been a primary purpose for non-native writers of English and, accordingly, many language components have been investigated to develop writers' fluency. One of these language components is syntactic complexity (SC), which is often regarded as a reliable way to grade any texts from easy to difficult. This study aims to…

Among other things, learning to write entails learning how to use complex sentences effectively in discourse. Some research has therefore focused on relating measures of syntactic complexity to text quality. Apart from the fact that the existing research on this topic appears inconclusive, most of it has been conducted in English L1 contexts. This…

Syntactic complexity is considered to be an important device for assessing the quality of writing in a second language (L2), as it indicates the diversity and complexity of production units or grammatical structures. This paper studies the development of Chinese college students' syntactic complexity in essay writing by using an Automatic Writing…