Research on integrated writing tasks is increasing, while there is a paucity of empirical findings on graph-based writing, as one type of these tasks. The present study purports to examine the contribution of L2 writing anxiety to university students' graph writing performance and the strategies they employ for these tasks. The participants of…

One of the important components in second language (L2) development is to produce clause-level units of form-meaning pairings or argument structure constructions. Based on the usage-based constructionist approach that language development entails an ability to use more diverse, more complex, and less frequent constructions, this study tested…

This study is an investigation of the effects of linguistic features on quality of second language (L2) writers' essays for writing course placement at Indiana University Bloomington (IUB), and by implication at other universities and colleges. This study addresses the following research questions: (1) To what extent do selected linguistic…

Based on the quantitative analysis of L2 English texts from Korean undergraduates, the present paper demonstrates the possibility of distinguishing L2 speaking proficiency with differing measures of syntactic complexity in English writing. To this end, 14 measures of complexity were gauged using an L2 Syntactic Analyzer (Lu, 2010) in 89 EFL essays…

To score an essay response, raters draw on previously trained skills and knowledge about the underlying rubric and score criterion. Cognitive processes such as remembering, forgetting, and skill decay likely influence rater performance. To investigate how forgetting influences scoring, we evaluated raters' scoring accuracy on TOEFL and GRE essays.…

Language learning is context-dependent and requires learners to employ different sets of language skills to fulfill various tasks. Yet standardized English as a foreign language assessments tend to conceptualize English proficiency as a unidimensional construct. In order to distinguish English proficiency as separate context-driven constructs, I…

Indices of lexical diversity have been used to estimate the size of a writer's vocabulary and/or a writer's lexical proficiency for some time. One issue with many commonly used indices of lexical diversity (e.g., TTR and index) is that they vary as a function of text length. Accordingly, much research has been devoted to the development of indices…

Lexical items that are encountered more frequently and in varying contexts have important effects on second language (L2) development because frequent and contextually diverse words are learned faster and become more entrenched in a learner's lexicon (Ellis 2002a, b). Despite evidence that L2 learners are generally exposed to non-native input,…

This study aimed to identify second language (L2) developmental indices while controlling for the effects of first language (L1). More specifically, this study investigated the differences in the use of metadiscourse markers among learners from different L1 backgrounds. The following research questions were explored: (1) Which metadiscourse…

Cohesion features were calculated for a corpus of 960 essays by 480 test-takers from the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) in order to examine differences in the use of cohesion devices between integrated (source-based) writing and independent writing samples. Cohesion indices were measured using an automated textual analysis tool, the…

Lexical richness makes an important contribution to L2 writing quality. To explore its importance, the study aims to identify and explain how lexical richness manifests in argumentative essays written in the final exam of reading and writing class by thirty-five undergraduates. The lexical richness consists of four interrelated elements: lexical…

An important topic in writing research has been the use of cohesive features. Much of this research has focused on local and text cohesion. The few studies that have studied global cohesion have been restricted to first language writing. This study investigates the development of local, global, and text cohesion in the writing of 57 language (L2)…

This article will consider using TOEFL scores for purposes of placement and advising for international graduate students at a northern California research university. As the number of international students is on the rise and the funds for the graduate ESL program are diminishing, the way in which the university is handling the influx of…

Whether foreign language writing is rated using analytic rating scales or holistically, the organization of ideas is invariably one of the aspects assessed. However, it is unclear what raters are sensitive to when rating writing for organization. Which do they value more highly, the physical aspects of organization, such as paragraphing and the…

This study explores whether linguistic features can predict second language writing proficiency in the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL iBT) integrated and independent writing tasks and, if so, whether there are differences and similarities in the two sets of predictive linguistic features. Linguistic features related to lexical…