Persuasive writing is a very important prerequisite for undergraduates in their academic life endeavour. For the students to effectively compose good persuasive writing, they need to understand and employ metadiscourse appropriately in their writing. However, a large number of Nigerian undergraduates face lots of challenges in using metadiscourse…

Incorporating counterarguments can be challenging for many student-writers, including those for whom English is a second or other language. In this study, we present findings that may lead to improvements in students' understanding of the benefits of integrating counterarguments. In our study, expert readers were presented with excerpts of student…

This study is a follow-up study of the continuation task, aiming to investigate the long-term alignment effects of the comparative continuation on L2 writing performance. The research lasted for a period of 16 weeks and employed a pretest-treatment-posttest research design. Two comparable groups of fifty-five Chinese undergraduate EFL learners…

The present study attempts to identify difficulties that Japanese students encounter with metadiscursive nouns in writing second language (L2) argumentation essays. Metadiscursive nouns are abstract and unspecific nouns which can serve as cohesive markers by retrieving their meanings in the text where they occur. Using a selected number of nouns…

The study investigated the interaction patterns of six ASEAN EFL university students when they worked in small groups on two collaborative writing tasks: a descriptive essay and an argumentative essay. Both groups were homogeneous in terms of gender and heterogeneous in terms of home countries. Data collection included pre- and posttest writing,…

In the 21st century where information has become easily available and accessible, education has shifted its attention to teaching students how to process and think critically about the information they receive. Welcoming the changes that education constantly witnesses, the field of English Language Teaching (ELT) has embraced the integration of…

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of continuation writing on the usages of the second language in the argumentative writing. The research questions in this study are as follows: 1) Whether the language application of the second language learner exists in coordination with the reading text; 2) Whether the continuation writing…

Coherent writing skill is an important prerequisite for academic success, especially at the tertiary level. This work studied the effect of four-month teaching intervention of genre pedagogy with Reading to Learn (R2L) approach for developing coherence in argumentative writing. It was implemented on 40 undergraduate Pakistani English Language…

Nurturing critical thinking (CT) has been acknowledged as a core objective of tertiary education, and drawn attention from academia of teaching English as a Foreign Language (EFL) in China. The thrust of the present study was to determine the association between CT and EFL argumentative writing among Chinese undergraduates. To this end, 110…

Central to argumentative writing is the proper use of epistemic devices (EDs), which distinguish writers' opinions from facts and evaluate the degree of certainty expressed in their statements. Important as these devices are, they turn out to constitute a thorny area for non-native speakers (NNS). Previous research indicates that Chinese EFL…

Prominence, as an important dimension of cognitive construal, refers to the capacity to evoke a certain substructure as the focus of attention, which can be materialized in a variety of semantic and grammatical expressions (Langacker, 1987). Subject of a sentence (Zhang, 2011) and specific sentence structures (Lin, 2013) can bring a substructure…

Metadiscourse is a prevalent linguistic resource that helps writers to manage the flow of the propositional contents and to direct their stance towards their contents and readers. Its dominance in persuasive writings has motivated this study which is to examine the occurrences and forms of metadiscourse use in the writing of both the high (HEP)…

The aim of this study was an attempt to investigate the use of conjunctions in argumentative essays written by English as a Foreign Language fourth-year undergraduate Libyan students majoring in English at Omar Al-Mukhtar University in Libya. A corpus of 32 argumentative essays was collected from a sample of 16 students in order to be investigated…

The current study was aimed at investigating the relationship between academic Iranian EFL learners' extroversion/introversion and their writing performance. The participants of the study were some 52 BA learners majoring in English language literature in Urmia and Tabriz state universities. The chosen sample comprised of both males and females…

This article presents a corpus-based investigation on English prepositions of time presented in the argumentative essays of Form 4 and Form 5 Malaysian secondary students in the MCSAW corpus. The aims were to find out the distribution patterns and the common errors in the use of preposition of time, "on" and "at". This corpus…