The conceptual activities required in an organizational behavior course are analyzed to study how they determined the nature of discourse. It is argued that these activities can be transferred from the English for Academic Purposes classroom to university content courses and can help nonnative speakers adapt to those areas. (36 references)…

The functions of oral language in university English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) composition classes are explored using a case study of instructional discourse in five ESL writing classes. Findings indicate relatively little classroom talk developed to topic invention/development or to oral rehearsal of potential written text. Techniques for…

Analyzes the metadiscourse in persuasive essays written by university students studying English as a Second Language at a midwestern university. Results indicate that skilled writers are aware of their readers' needs and control the strategies for making their texts accessible to the reader, whereas poor writers cannot generate considerate texts.…

A study compared the influences of rhetorical and sentence-level features on holistic essay scores assigned by raters who are experienced writing instructors but not trained in English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) instruction. In scoring six university-level essays, these raters placed emphasis on ESL sentence-level errors far more than on essays'…

Analyzes the academic records of 191 nonnative students who took a writing examination in 1991 to assess their performance on the writing examination of Georgia State University. Results indicate that questions remain about the relationship between English proficiency and academic preparation and about responsibilities for academically weak…