This study aims to analyse how Japanese first-year university students' writing anxiety in academic writing classes changed over nine months. A total of 102 Japanese first-year university students participated in an academic writing class. Two assessors evaluated the students' compositions, using the same writing assessment rubric. The students…

Language immersion programs seek to develop multilingual, multiliterate individuals able to engage with academic content. Studies of immersion students' language development provide details regarding language proficiency and accuracy, yet they generally do not address how features of written, academic language, for example, syntactic and lexical…

The language features of the second language (L2) English academic texts written by Indonesian graduate students enrolled in Hungarian higher education are employed in the present study. The study focuses on the level of abstraction and informational density in student assignments in particular. Seven high-stakes essays were collected from seven…

This paper analyzes writing tasks in academic writing textbooks for Japanese university students, focusing on the organization and difficulty of these tasks based on the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR). A total of 411 writing tasks from 30 textbooks were coded by two experienced Japanese English teachers. The author…

This case study examines postgraduate students' practices, sources of knowledge, and difficulties and challenges in regard to providing genre-based peer feedback on their peers' academic writing at a research-oriented university in Macau. The analysis of multiple sources of data including the students' written feedback on their peers' thesis…

Analytical writing poses particularly challenging, yet often overlooked, language demands that need attention in educational research and practice. In this article, I discuss the Core Analytical Language Skills (CALS) construct and its relevance for school reading and writing. CALS refer to the set of learners' school-relevant language resources…

The purpose of this study was to assess how the Inquiry Based Learning approach supports the development of students' academic language proficiency in invertebrate systematic. The study was framed by Halliday's sociolinguistic approach to learning. A total of 50 classroom observation sessions at 10 schools were conducted: 10 before and 40 after…

Soon after Kachru (1992) promoted the notion of the World of English(es) through his 'inner-outer-expanding circle' principle, academic audiences started to recognize that the number of English nonnative speakers had noticeably surpassed that of native speakers. Such a phenomenon has encouraged English learners of diverse lingua-cultural…

Peer review is generally regarded as a useful learning tool for students, providing them with opportunities to interact with their peers when engaging in the process of critical reading and critical thinking, thus possibly raising students' motivation to learn. For peer review to be a manageable task for students, appropriate scaffolding is…

Investigating lexical richness is a continuing concern within vocabulary studies. The present study aims to contribute to this growing area of research by exploring EFL learners' free active vocabulary by dividing them into groups based on their receptive vocabulary. It seeks to explain the role of different essay types and proficiency levels…

The poster discusses the possibilities of technology-assisted peer feedback in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) writing classrooms among low proficiency students. It is a part of an ongoing research project developed after a study conducted in the first half of 2019 (Lazic & Tsuji, 2020a, 2020b). The first goal is to explore the…

This paper presents a theoretical and empirical case for the value of scenario-based assessment (SBA) in the measurement of students' written argumentation skills. First, we frame the problem in terms of creating a reasonably efficient method of evaluating written argumentation skills, including for students at relatively low levels of competency.…

Written communication skills are one of the most assessed criteria in higher education contexts, especially in humanities disciplines, including teacher education. There is a need to research and develop an assessment grading tool (i.e. criteria sheet or rubric) that would assist students in pre-service teacher education programs to better…

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…

The importance of plagiarism in an academic setting cannot be overlooked. Creating an awareness of plagiarism avoidance amongst students may be achievable and teaching students certain skills to avoid plagiarism, like paraphrasing, may also be possible. Although paraphrasing is one of the most important skills for avoiding plagiarism, it is a real…