Writing is an important communicative language skill. It is an activity that requires a mental effort to "think out" the sentences and the ways of joining them to be meaningful and communicative. The present study was set up to the effectiveness of collaborative instruction on developing EFL students' writing ability and also to delve…

Background: Although students in teacher education programmes in Namibia study through the medium of English, their academic language (AL) proficiency remains a challenge for most of them. In the Junior Primary Education programmes, they are not only required to master AL for their own studies, but they must also learn how to teach emergent…

Although research on content and language integrated learning (CLIL) has shown that CLIL instruction may enhance students' second or foreign language learning compared to regular foreign language instruction, there are also studies that have indicated similar language development between CLIL and non-CLIL students. However, CLIL can be organized…

Swales' (1990) Creating a Research Space (CARS) model has spawned a large number of studies focusing on investigations of research article introductions (RAIs), and the reports have given meaningful contributions to guide novice and non-native authors in writing English RAIs. However, the investigation of authors' research gap strategies in RAIs…

In this commentary, we begin with the discussion on a brief history of academic wordlists. Adopting a comparative perspective, then, the merits and demerits of the Academic Word List (AWL) (Coxhead, 2000) and its competing counterpart the Academic Vocabulary List (AVL) (Gardner & Davies, 2014) are presented. We also explore whether the AWL can…

Grounded in the activity theory, we adopted a sequential explanatory mixed-methods approach to explore the impact of automated written corrective feedback (AWCF) on English as a foreign language (EFL) learners' academic writing skills (i.e. task achievement, coherence and cohesion, lexicon, and grammatical range and accuracy). To this end, two…

This study examined the differences and similarities among the writing of three types of developmental English and advanced ESL United States community college students, comparing the writing of resident English learners (RL2), whose home language was not English but who attended United States public schools for five years or more, to that of…

This empirical study serves two purposes. The first purpose is to validate a newly developed instrument, the Metacognitive Academic Writing Strategies Questionnaire (MAWSQ), which represents the multifaceted structure of metacognition in an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) academic writing setting. The second purpose is to delineate the…

Academic speech in the higher education community is an important form of communication and connection for scholars. Metacognition of academic speech for international multilingual graduate students is an understudied area. The purpose of the current study was to understand metacognition during academic speech for international multilingual…

This study aims to identify how feasible it is to use comparative judgement (CJ) and student judges to assess the writing performance of English language learners. For this purpose, 35 paragraphs written by the students who were enrolled in a freshman Academic Writing course at a semi-private university located in the Turkish Republic of Northern…

This study explored the effects of three types of lexical tools (MOOCs, E-dictionaries, and lexical concordancers) and three types of lexical applications (technology-mediated communication-based applications (TMCA), Anki as an e-flashcard application, and WordUp as a dedicated lexical application) on learning academic core words among a sample of…

VocQGen is an automated tool designed to generate multiple-choice cloze (MCC) questions for vocabulary assessment in second language learning contexts. It leverages several natural language processing (NLP) tools and OpenAI's GPT-4 model to produce MCC items quickly from user-specified word lists. To evaluate its effectiveness, we used the first…

Background: Implementing English medium instruction (EMI) has become a proliferating measure in higher education to embrace globalization. Nevertheless, university students reported various challenges in taking EMI courses. Objectives: This study investigated the effect of the computer-mediated terminology pretraining on university students' EMI…

Automated writing evaluation (AWE) has been frequently used to provide feedback on student writing. Many empirical studies have examined the effectiveness of AWE on writing quality, but the results were inconclusive. Thus, the magnitude of AWE's overall effect and factors influencing its effectiveness across studies remained unclear. This study…

English language learners (ELLs) lack academic vocabulary knowledge, an essential component that explains much of the persistent achievement gap between students who start schools as ELLs and their monolingual peers. This single-subject experimental design study addressed this issue by focusing on self-regulated vocabulary learning that helps ELLs…