Unfolding models are frequently used to develop scales for measuring attitudes. Recently, unfolding models have been applied to examine rater severity and accuracy within the context of rater-mediated assessments. One of the problems in applying unfolding models to rater-mediated assessments is that the substantive interpretations of the latent…

Syntactic complexity is a crucial aspect of linguistic proficiency and thus understanding and supporting such development in learners is a keen concern for language teachers. Research conducted has shown growing sophistication of noun phrase structures by writers of different abilities in academic writing (Biber & Gray, 2010; Liu & Li,…

However influential the interdependence hypothesis has become in bilingual research, it still lacks full empirical support. This longitudinal study explores the parallels in the biliteracy development (L1 Spanish and L2 English) of 20 students in a European immersion programme (i.e. CLIL) over a two-year period. A bilingual learner corpus of…

The last four decades have observed a renewed research interest in the area of error analysis. It has been the focus of attention, and subject of debate, among scholars particularly those of second-language acquisition. Scholars in this area of study hold the unanimous view that errors are an integral and unavoidable feature of second-language…

The paper describes initial efforts on creating a system for the automatic assessment of Swedish second language (L2) learner essays from two points of view: holistic evaluation of the reached level according to the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR), and the lexical analysis of texts for receptive and productive vocabulary per CEFR…

This article examines Verb Network Strengthening Treatment (VNeST), a relatively new treatment approach for anomia in people with aphasia. The VNeST protocol aims to promote generalization to increased lexical retrieval of untrained words across a hierarchy of linguistic tasks, including single-word naming of nouns and verbs, sentence production,…

Developed to evaluate secondary school students' writing fluency skills, this study is descriptive in nature and uses a mixed method approach. During the research, the researcher attempted to identify students' abilities to write in terms of quantity and complexity, on the one hand, and also attempted to identify findings on accuracy, the…

Currently influential models of writing processes, such as Flower and Hayes (1980) and Hayes (1996) do not attend explicitly to metalinguistics--writers' ability to monitor and control linguistic skills. Dimensions of metalinguistic ability--metaphonology, metasyntax, metasemantics, metapragmatics, and metatext--arguably are central to the writing…

The study applied the Multi-Dimensional analysis used by Biber (1988) to examine the functional parameters of essays. Co-occurrence patterns were identified within an essay corpus (n=1529) using a linguistic indices provided by Co-Metrix. These patterns were used to identify essay groups that shared features based upon situational parameters.…

Clinical Question: Would Spanish-speaking ELL students who struggle to learn to write (P) benefit more from a writing intervention that addresses cognitive (executive function) and social well-being (motivation, peer inclusion) (I), or writing intervention strategies that address written language text macrostructure or microstructure only (C), as…

The Sentence Combining Test was administered to three groups of college students (N=45) identified as learning disabled (LD), normal, and basic (underachieving) writers. Among results was that LD writers made a higher percentage of meaning errors across all subtests. (Author/JW)

A study examined the semantic modifications students made to their texts in a structured revision task. Nineteen grade 6 students revised a book report they had previously written in class. Students: (1) added or deleted information from their texts in specific places identified by the experimenters through semantic frame analyses; (2) judged…

The compositions of 49 students (ages 10-14) with deafness or hearing impairments and 49 typical students were compared to investigate the frequency and proportional distribution of written-language variables. Differences were found between the strategies chosen by the students with deafness or hearing impairments in both syntax and semantics and…

Purpose: Persuasive writing is a demanding task that requires the use of complex language to analyze, discuss, and resolve controversies in a way that is clear, convincing, and considerate of diverse points of view. This investigation examined selected aspects of later language development in the context of persuasive writing. The purpose of the…