OpenCourseWare (OCW) and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have gained increasing popularity and importance because they greatly expand students' access to university lectures. Although the main component of OCW and MOOC platforms is lectures, their differences may potentially affect the difficulty of academic listening comprehension. This study…

According to the IELTS official website, IELTS candidates usually score lower in the IELTS Writing test than in the other language skills. This is disappointing for the many IELTS candidates who fail to get the overall band score they need. Surprisingly enough, few studies have addressed this issue. The present study, then, is aimed at shedding…

This study aimed to investigate the lexical competence of English-major EFL students. The learner corpus comprised 552 pieces of writing by sophomore English majors during five academic years between 2017 and 2021, containing 190,506words in total. The results from Vocab Profile program showed that these students used words contained in the…

This article reviews three decades of scholarship to establish connection(s) between language diversity and integrity research. It makes the case that by shifting the vocabulary, methods, and scope of our work, we scholar-practitioners and integrity professionals become better able to equitably support multilingual learners in their writing from…

This study examines lexical density, lexical diversity and academic vocabulary use in the dissertation abstracts written by EFL (English as a foreign language), ESL (English as a second language) and English L1 (Native Speakers) postgraduate students to find out whether these lexical features differ across different English language backgrounds of…

Previous research on the development of second language (L2) reading comprehension among adolescents and adults has looked at the relative importance of students' second language (L2) linguistic skills and home language (L1) reading comprehension skills in the development of L2 reading comprehension, with many studies finding a more important role…

Classroom assessment practices can be confusing for many teachers. Terminology is numerous and elusive. Different types of assessment serve different purposes. This short discussion paper's contribution originates from my own attempt to determine whether analytic scales would be more appropriate than holistic scales for assessing the L2 writing…

Despite previous research suggesting that first language (L1) use fulfills important functions in collaborative writing (CW) tasks, research has yet to examine whether L1 or second language (L2) use may lead to variation in the lexico-grammatical aspects of learners' collaborative texts and the pair talk. Using a corpus-based approach, this study…

This paper analyses the learning process of students of a Master's course in Cooperation and Development (C&D) who attend classes in English for Academic Writing at the University of Calabria, and their awareness of competences achieved. The language objectives are to expand students' knowledge of the main elements of spoken and written…

This study is primarily designed for investigating the tertiary students' perspectives on the writing difficulties of essays. This study was conducted in explanatory research in which quantitative and qualitative data were obtained from the web-based questionnaire and semi-structured interview, then analyzed separately. Twenty-one undergraduate…

The rhetorically complex concluding components of academic written texts often challenge novice writers, having to summarise their arguments and stance, and offer prospective comments on future developments concerning the subject matter. With an aim to elucidate the lexicogrammatical expressions of such prospective comments in essay conclusions,…

This study sought to explore the formality styles of writing among intermediate EFL Iranian learners to scrutinize their competence in the writing skill. A convenience sample of 30 students were chosen through Oxford Quick Placement Test (2001) from among 60 university students. The first group sent their messages (essay tasks) through e-mail and…

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…

This empirical study attempts to examine the use of cohesive devices in the written discourse of EFL undergraduate students and seeks to find how the use of incorrect and repetitive cohesive ties affects the effectiveness of academic writing. Halliday and Hasan's (1976) list of cohesive devices was employed to analyze the cohesion in the…

Studies in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) indicate that the use of discourse markers (DMs) in the academic writing of second language learners improves the overall quality of these texts by contributing to their cohesion and comprehensibility (Saif Modhish 2012; Jalilifar 2008; Intaraprawat & Steffensen 1995). However, despite the…