Broadly defined, academic language (AL) is a set of lexical-grammatical norms and registers commonly used in educational and academic discourse. Mastery of academic language in writing is an important aspect of writing instruction and assessment. The purpose of this study was to use Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools to examine the extent to…

This study investigated how computer agents' language style affects summary writing in an Intelligent Tutoring System, called CSAL AutoTutor. Participants interacted with two computer agents in one of three language styles: (1) a "formal" language style, (2) an "informal" language style, and (3) a "mixed" language…

This study examines associations between writing instruction with a focus on explicit sentence syntax and reading comprehension in a sample of students receiving special education services. While the outcome data does not show direct causation between student enrollment in a treatment writing course using Systemic Functional Linguistics and…

This study investigated how computer agents' language style affects summary writing in an Intelligent Tutoring System, called CSAL AutoTutor. Participants interacted with two computer agents in one of three language styles: (1) a "formal" language style; (2) an "informal" language style; and (3) a "mixed" language…

This study examines the nature of metalinguistic awareness in first-year college writers enrolled in two-year degree programs, corequisite support courses, or both. Metalinguistic awareness is an ability to systematize knowledge about language and use that knowledge to monitor language as language. Participants in the study completed reading…

Although the literature on computer-assisted language learning has demonstrated that digital tools such as online translators and bilingual dictionaries offer affordances to second language (or foreign language) writers of English to solve linguistic (lexical and syntactic) issues, the extent to which digital technology supports multilingual…

This study examines the linguistic complexity of Spanish as a second language (L2) in learners' essays across proficiency levels at two timelines of a composition class during a college semester. Data comes from 22 L2 learners of Spanish enrolled in two sections of a third-year composition class at the college level, who were assigned nine…

Linguistic complexity serves as an important measure of second language (L2) writing development. Complexity indices, however, rarely feature in the studies of learner languages other than English. Additionally, L2 writing studies have been criticized for the lack of consistency in defining proficiency. The current study addresses these gaps by…

From the perspective of complexity theory and based on Robinson's Cognition Hypothesis and the Triadic Componential Framework, this paper investigated the effect of manipulating task complexity along resource-dispersing dimension on L2 written performance. The results showed that: 1) Significant interactive effects were found between the two…

With the change in socio-political and educational contexts in global academia, the trend of writing academic papers has arisen among Nepali students and educators in higher education. However, many of them are still unfamiliar with the basic standard to be incorporated in an academic paper. In this context, this study examined the post-graduate…

This study investigates the influence of a grammatical reconstruction task on talk and subsequent individual writing. In a South Korean university, two classes alternated learning conditions, between 'read-summarize-write' and 'read-reconstruct-write'. In the summarize condition, small groups collaborated to create a summary of the reading; in the…

Studies in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) indicate that the use of discourse markers (DMs) in the academic writing of second language learners improves the overall quality of these texts by contributing to their cohesion and comprehensibility (Saif Modhish 2012; Jalilifar 2008; Intaraprawat & Steffensen 1995). However, despite the…

The impacts of task characteristics on second language (L2) writing require further exploration. This study examined the effects of increasing task complexity on L2 argumentative writing. Upper-intermediate L2 learners performed two writing tasks with varying degrees of complexity in relation to the number of elements and the degree of reasoning.…

This paper sums up partial results of a long-term project aimed at determining specific needs in teaching advanced English students at the Institute of Foreign Languages of the Faculty of Education, Palacký University, where both authors have been teaching for more than 15 years. In our advanced English students, we have long observed a tendency…

Scholars such as Diane Kelly-Riley and Patricia Bizzell have argued that the student writing feature most likely to place a student into a basic writing course is the presence of dialect other than standard academic English. This essay examines how assessment practices can foster students' diverse languages rather than inhibit them. I conducted a…