This study explored a way to help Japanese university students write longer essays while maintaining grammatical accuracy. Participants were three groups of students enrolled in a one-year EFL course in different academic years (N = 111), and the number of words they wrote in 30 minutes and the number of errors made per 100 words were compared. To…

Metaphors are known to present both opportunities and challenges for second language learners, but relatively little is known about learners' awareness of them. To investigate this, we analyzed 72 argumentative essays written in English by a group of 37 intermediate Chinese university students of English. We identified metaphors using an…

This study investigated the effect of consistent freewriting practice on written fluency development. Thirty-nine first-year university students completed 70 10-minute freewriting activities over the course of an academic semester. Written fluency, measured as words produced per minute (wpm), increased from a mean of 19.5 wpm to 30.1 wpm over a…

Since its release, ChatGPT has raised concerns in many teaching contexts given its threat to reliably evaluating learners' knowledge and skills. Within task-based pedagogy, however, this technology opens new avenues for second language (L2) teaching when adopting the technology as a writing buddy. Our study explores how ChatGPT as a model impacts…

Researchers have been investigating the effects of different planning conditions on learners' second language (L2) writing performance. However, whether such effects differ regarding specific planning conditions and task complexity has remained underexplored. This study examined the effects of pre-task planning (PTP) versus unpressured online…

Writing in a language different from one's mother tongue is a daunting task. The same challenge may apply to languages that have diglossic features whose spoken form differs from the written form. This article investigates Arab students' writing behaviors (fluency, pauses, and revision) in response to an argumentative composition in their L1…

Background: Data-driven learning (DDL) has been regarded as one of the promising approaches that could effectively enhance writing performance of English as a foreign language (EFL) learners. Although extensive research has been conducted on the use of DDL in developing various aspects of writing skill, there exist only few studies to date that…

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…

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…

Although research about the effectiveness of second or foreign language collaborative writing for jointly written products has proliferated in the last few decades, there has been less examination of whether and how pre-task preparation could maximize the language learning opportunities that collaborative writing can afford learners. Informed by…

Although fluency is an important subconstruct of language proficiency, it has not received as much attention in L2 writing research as complexity and accuracy have, in part due to the lack of methodological approaches for the analysis of large datasets of writing-process data. This article presents a method of time-aligned keystroke logging and…

Research into the potential of collaborative writing is relatively new. Similarly, task repetition (TR), which has been claimed to be a valuable tool for language learning, has been rarely explored in the context of writing. Therefore, little is known about the potential of combining TR and collaborative writing, and even less if we focus on young…

The present study was an attempt to investigate the differential effect/s of three different planning time scenarios (i.e. 0 min, 10 min, & 20 min), as well as three task conditions of (1) topic given, (2) topic and ideas given, and (3) topic, ideas and macrostructure given on EFL learners L2 writing complexity, accuracy and fluency (CAF).…

This study investigated how task complexity influences second language (L2) writing. Specifically, it focused on the possibility that prompts can create different demands at different stages of L2 writing production and on ways that prompts may affect learners' engagement in the revision of their writing. Fifty-one English as a foreign/second…

Investigating the effects of task design and implementation features on second language (L2) production is necessary, as the findings can provide potential insights into pedagogical and assessment task design and sequencing as well as into the nature of L2 learners' attentional resources. To this end, this study probed into the effects of task…