One of the critiques of proficiency as defined by scales, such as that of ACTFL, is its lack of grounding in linguistic realities. Measures of complexity, accuracy, and fluency provide a route in which proficiency can be quantitatively measured by identifying linguistic correlates (see Brown et al., 2017; Long et al., 2012). This project aimed to…

A well-crafted research proposal is a cornerstone of successful academic inquiry, particularly for Master of Arts (MA) and Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) candidates in fields such as education and TESOL/TEFL (Locke et al., 2010; Punch, 2016). This comprehensive guide provides practical, detailed, and rigorous guidelines for novice researchers at…

While most of the L2 writing literature focuses on tertiary L2 writing, there is relatively scanty research conducted with adolescent L2 writers. The present study aims to explore Chinese adolescent L2 writing from the perspective of writing as meaning-making in systemic functional linguistics tradition. Drawing on the framework of process type…

Increased attention to genre in writing studies has brought a proliferation of new terms and concepts for capturing the complexity of writers' knowledge about genres, including genre knowledge, genre awareness, recontextualization, conditional knowledge, and metacognition. Definitions of these concepts have at times conflicted, and their…

In language education, teaching a language as a foreign language is an emerging field compared to teaching it as a mother tongue. However, the experiences obtained in mother tongue education are adapted to teaching a language as a foreign language with various amendments and therefore progress in this field has been achieved. Council of Europe…

This article reports on the design and implementation of an alternative form of writing assessment in a UK English for Academic Purposes (EAP) pre-sessional course. The assessment, termed processfolio, was a response to research inquiry into how writing assessment in a local context negated student agency and inculcated disempowering models of…

For Vygotsky, language is a cultural-psychological concept emerged from social interactions and is applied for higher cognitive functions such as thinking, meaning making, and knowledge construction. In this study, a sociocultural perspective was applied to analyze the language produced by 40 sophomore Iranian EFL learners during dialogic…

In recent years, contentiously for some, universities have developed generalist skills lists and associated curricula in response to government demand for more "employment-ready" graduates. Such training usually includes writing and communication. In Australia and the UK, guidelines designed to support the development of skills…

This paper offers a narrative framework for understanding how multilingual graduate students make sense of the continuous and frequently contradictory talk they engage in as they write. It illustrates how attention to the telling, form, and content of the stories such students relate about their ongoing interactions around academic writing can…

The use of a blog as a pedagogical aid for the learning of foreign languages is gaining support among teachers' communities (Soubrie, 2006; Tome, 2007) as it can help students develop online interactions and authentic productions. The current study is analysing the use of such a multimedia setting in a group of Master's students in France,…

The potential of online language learning has received much attention recently. This paper reports the design of an online writing system featuring learning support for non-native students during their writing process. The central premise is that in the online writing situation, students are in great need of writing aids. The proposed system…

Describes guidelines for writing teacher comments on English-as-a-Second-Language essays. The guidelines encourage teachers to comment between drafts, to offer students questions about their writing, and to include comments of praise and encouragement. (Author/VWL)

This article presents a writing portfolio project whose primary goal is to integrate the development of proficiency skills, content knowledge, and grammatical competence through literary study. Excerpts from Queneau's (1947) "Exercices de style," which tells the same story 99 times, serve as the basis for this portfolio project: These excerpts are…