In the past three decades, the construct of second language (L2) writing complexity has been theorized and refined in both second language acquisition (SLA) (Crossley, 2020; Housen, De Clercq, Kuiken, & Vedder, 2019; Lu, 2011; Norris & Ortega, 2009) and Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) research (Byrnes, 2009; Ryshina-Pankova, 2015;…

L2 student writers in UK universities often seek the services of a 'proofreader' before submitting work for assessment, and the proliferation of freelance proofreaders and online proofreading agencies has led to debates about the ethics of the proofreading of student writing in publications such as "Times Higher Education". This study…

Writing research articles is an important and demanding task for members of academia, and the introduction is generally considered the most difficult portion to write (Swales, 1990). Move analysis has proven useful in studying the communicative functions of introductions and other sections of research articles, and is thus beneficial in training…

Email has become the most preferred form of business communication. Writing "good" email has become an essential skill required in the industry. "Good" email writing not only facilitates clear communication, but also makes a positive impression on the recipient, whether it be one's colleague or a customer. The aim of this paper…

This study examined optimal learning schedules for second language (L2) acquisition of a morphological structure. Sixty participants studied the simple and complex morphological rules of a novel miniature language system so as to use them for oral production. They engaged in four training sessions in either shorter spaced (3.3-day interval) or…

The purpose of the present paper is to offer a state-of-the-art review on the topic of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and its theoretical and practical implications on the field of language education. SFL has been widely recognized due to its potentiality to encourage both reflection and action for the participants involved, becoming over…

The continuation task, a new form of reading-writing integrated task in which test-takers read an incomplete story and then write the continuation and ending of the story, has been increasingly used in writing assessment, especially in China. However, language-test developers' understanding of the effects of important task-related factors on…

The Interface Hypothesis (Sorace, 2000) developed in line with the Minimalist theory of grammar (Chomsky, 1995 et seq.) supports the view of L2 acquisition that syntactic properties are acquired early while the acquisition of interface properties is delayed. One of the interface properties is inflectional morphology on English verbs, which…

The notion of "textuality" encouraged Halliday and Hasan in 1976 to present their model of discourse analysis through raising questions about whether "cohesion" was a semantic concept or a structural relation, whether a text was a structural unit or not or even if there were semantic or structural relationships within a text.…

This study investigated the impact of conversational agent formality on the quality of summaries and formality of written summaries during the training session and on posttest in a trialog-based intelligent tutoring system (ITS). During training, participants learned summarization strategies with the guidance of conversational agents who spoke one…

Reading rate, usually measured in words per minute, is a common operationalization of reading fluency in second language (L2) research and pedagogy. However, the impact of word length is often not addressed. This paper presents two studies showing how the number of characters in a text influences L2 reading time, independent of word counts, within…

Cognitive organizers (COs) are text aids which represent objects, concepts, and their relations by the use of symbols and spatial arrangements without adding to semantic content. The present study examines language learners' text comprehension through outlines, a popular CO, compared with text-only condition, and further investigates the effect of…

Purpose: This study aims to examine the writing outcomes of 6th-grade students learning English as a second language. Design/methodology/approach: In all 45 students in a text structure instruction (TSI) group were compared with 45 students in a self-regulated strategy instruction (SRSI) group and 43 students receiving traditional writing…

The development of an appropriate authorial voice is considered to be fundamental to successful academic writing in the target language. Voice research in second language (L2) writing, therefore, seeks to delineate voice salience in L2 academic texts, the relationship between voice and high quality academic writing, the second language writer's…

The purpose of this study is to explore the existing effect of gloss conditions on reading comprehension and vocabulary understanding of learners in the context of English as a foreign language. The study composed of 72 male students aged between 19 and 21 years selected from Qassim University in Saudi Arabia. The participants were divided into…