Inspired by Rebecca Oxford's thought-provoking reflections on language learning strategies, and particularly her orchestra metaphor on how the strategies work together, I conducted a study that seeks to understand how non-native writers employ, configure, sequence and combine individual writing strategies when creating a text in the target…

Designed to gauge the actions, skills, and strategies that students use to identify, extract, and synthesize information from multiple source materials, integrated writing tasks are particularly challenging for ESL writers. Previous research tended to focus on a limited number of integrated tasks, mostly summaries of one or two sources, thus…

Past research of rhetoric has relied on simple binary comparisons between groups that either do, or do not, possess a cultural trait. While countries like Korea and the UAE may share cultural values such as an acceptance of unequal power relationships (power distance) and a preference for group action (collectivism), these traits vary in degrees…

Characterized by specific and rigid boundaries of institutional practices and expectations in the academy, student writing is a synergistic literacy practice where students are required to construct generically diverse texts by yoking concepts with appropriate linguistic resources. This empirical study involving 196 first-year ESL students at a…

Argumentative writing is a genre of writing that is considered difficult by EFL students at the university level. This study aimed to investigate problems faced by EFL students in writing an argumentative essay and to explain their strategies to overcome the problems. The participants of this study were ten fifth-semester students of the 2023-2024…

Although regulation has become a critical method to improve the effect of collaborative writing in L2 classes, it is still not clear how the regulation activities influence peer interactions, which is important for improvement of regulation itself. This case study examined dynamic interactions of several small teams of ESL students when they…

Second language writing researchers have examined the affordances of Automated Writing Evaluation programs in providing immediate feedback that helps improve students' writing outputs. However, a little is known about tracking learners' process during writing essays and whether much/less pauses made by learners could predict good/poor quality of…

This research investigated the effect of SPAWN strategy in developing persuasive writing skills and productive habits of mind in the English language among second secondary grade students. The study adopted the quasi-experimental design, which involves two groups: experimental and control. For data collection, the researcher designed the following…

This study attempts to determine whether the students who receive explicit instruction make more gains in their abilities to use topic-induced phrases in their writing than those who do not. Additionally, through interviews with a selected group of students from the treatment group, the study attempts to glean insights into the approaches learners…

This activity uses podcasts to model narrative writing techniques. The challenges students face when exercising narrative writing skills are unique when compared to those of persuasive and expository writing; my students have repeatedly expressed their qualms with articulating experiences that engage their audience. Although students have…

The purpose of the study was to determine the impact of mind mapping as a strategy in generating ideas before writing on the EFL students' idea development in argumentative writing as perceived from their gender differences and learning styles. By conducting an experimental investigation at university level in Indonesia, two existing TOEFL classes…

In EFL composition courses, teaching and learning normally orbit around norms of unity, coherence, support, and sentence skills that L2 learners are expected to comply with, at the expense of opportunities to develop voice. Against this backdrop, we resolved to examine the extent to which students' exposure to and practice with lexical bundles,…

This study investigated EFL college students' culture-related templates of written texts along the possibility of inter-cultural transfer. We designed a case study to explore how certain cultural assumptions contribute to EFL students' rhetorical decisions while writing an argumentative writing. The participants were four EFL college students.…

This case study examined dynamic interactions of two small teams of English as Second Language students when they performed two collaborative argument writing tasks in asynchronous and synchronous web-based contexts. The two teams exhibited different interaction patterns when switching between contexts. These patterns were identified in terms of…

The number of English language learners (ELLs) mainstreamed into regular classrooms continues to increase. Curricular writing standards required by the Common Core State Standards require students to write essays analytically in response to text(s). Many English Language Arts (ELA) teachers may worry about effectively delivering essay writing…