This paper presents the findings of a descriptive multiple case study carried out with six teachers of English in five public secondary schools in a city in northwestern Mexico aimed to determine how writing was taught. A mixed methods approach was followed with an embedded design in which qualitative data had increased weight and quantitative…

In recent years, there has been a growing trend of using informal styles in academic writing, including research articles. To examine the degree of formality in students' writing, this corpus-based study aimed to analyze the formal linguistic features in the academic writing assignments of English-major students at a Thai university. The learner…

This study was conducted at a university based in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. The purpose of the study was to determine if the explicit instruction of selected grammar aspect, modal auxiliary verbs, improved students' ability to write English. The study was qualitative in nature and a case study design was adopted. The focus was in relation to a…

This study examines the relationship between EFL students' noticing and three written feedback strategies. The convenience sampling method was adopted and four intact classes were randomly assigned into four groups: the model, the error correction, the reformulation, and the control groups. After the completion of picture-cued writing tasks as…

Although the behavior and impacts of instructor reflection in writing classes have been extensively studied over the past few decades, a significant proportion of the work has concentrated on students' attitudes and utilization of all such responses, as opposed to teachers' perspectives, self-assessments, and actual text comments given. Research…

This paper examines the English grammatical errors and their patterns in the written assignments of a General Education course at City University of Hong Kong. Subjects are 60 local and non-local (exchange) undergraduate students who are all L2 learners with diversified education and disciplinary background (i. e. their major of study) which are…

Many EFL teachers spend a lot of time marking students' written assignments and correcting their spelling, grammatical, punctuation, organization and idea generation errors in detail. The more mistakes students make the more meticulously they mark and correct mistakes. Despite meticulous error correction, students continue to make the same…

Writing proper English sentences poses a significant challenge for Arabic-speaking postsecondary students studying English as a Foreign Language (EFL) due to substantial differences between Arabic and English syntactic structures. This basic qualitative study explored the perceptions of Arabic-speaking EFL learners at an Arabian university…

This paper aims to provide information about teacher corrective feedback that would be helpful for EFL students' writing improvement. It focuses on feedback provided to correct grammatical errors made by student writers as the author finds that this type of errors can obstruct the effectiveness of students' pieces of writing and may result in…

This case study explores the challenges that Master's students encounter when learning to write in academic English as part of a UK postgraduate course, after having achieved the required IELTS entry score. Interviews with six Chinese and Japanese learners at different stages of the Master's study revealed more sophisticated writing difficulties…

The current paper is a mixed method study which aimed to find out teacher written feedback preferences of a group of prep-class students at a public university in Turkey. The written corrective feedback preferences of 37 students with high level of proficiency in English were examined via a questionnaire and an interview. The study lasted for two…

This study examines a common pedagogical approach whereby students view teacher feedback outside of class time. Facilitated through Moodle, it aimed to investigate not only the effect of written corrective feedback (WCF) on learning outcomes, but importantly, how frequently students review the feedback they receive. The study was conducted at a…

Prior research has shown that EFL learners who wrote collaboratively with partners using wikis improved the content quality and language accuracy of their L2 individual writing more than students who wrote individually. Drawing on the dataset from Hsu and Lo's study, the current study explores the nature of the students' collaborative dialogue…

Adopting a genre lens informed by Systemic Functional Linguistics (cf. Halliday & Matthiessen, [Halliday, M. A. K., 2004]; Martin & Rose, [Martin, J. R., 2008]), this paper explores the text-structural and lexico-grammatical choices that second language (L2) writers of German make in personal letter writing. Close analysis of two student…

The main objective of this study was to investigate theories and practices of writing. To achieve this objective, qualitative data were collected using qualitative content (document) analysis, observation, and interview. The participants of the study were selected from North Shoa Zone Preparatory Schools. Five sections for observation and ten…