This research aims to investigate the effects of two teaching sequences -- interleaving and blocking -- on the participants' use of three types of cohesive devices (conjunctions, conjunctive adverbs and prepositions [thereafter CCPs]) in their argumentative essays. The participants included 50 native Cantonese-speaking university students taking…

Linguistic complexity serves as an important measure of second language (L2) writing development. Complexity indices, however, rarely feature in the studies of learner languages other than English. Additionally, L2 writing studies have been criticized for the lack of consistency in defining proficiency. The current study addresses these gaps by…

This article investigates the lexical and discourse features of English text and discourse with automated computer technologies. Specifically, this article examines the cohesion of English text and discourse with automated computer tools, Coh-Metrix and TEES. Coh-Metrix is a text analysis computer tool that can analyze English text and discourse…

This paper discusses the importance of helping college composition students to become stylistically competent and cites a study that examined the essays of 32 college students and 27 skilled adult writers. T-unit measurements revealed that there is little difference between the groups in the number of clauses per T-unit, but the skilled writers…

Compares Spanish and English essays written by bilingual writers. Describes each writer's discourse-organizational and clausal-combining strategies. Suggests that organization on the discourse level is reflected in the type of clausal combinations chosen by the writers at the sentence level. (TB)

A study was conducted to determine whether a significant correlation existed between an essay's letter grade and five important factors of syntactic maturity (clause length, t-unit length, sentence length, clauses per t-unit, and t-units per sentence). A total of 45 essays--15 A, 15 B, and 15 C papers as graded by five junior college English…