A novel instrument, the Features of Excellent Arguments task (FEXA), was developed to elicit adolescents' judgments about argumentative essays displaying to varying degrees features characteristic of strong persuasive writing: academic language, rich evidence, multiple perspectives, and rhetorical appeal. We collected students' categorical choices…

In this experiment, we contrasted two instructions in which the focus of summary writing was varied. We predicted that students would better understand a scientific text when they learn to focus their summaries on the referential content rather than on the hierarchical structure of the text. In a 2 × 2 factorial experiment, 85 Grade-10 students…

The present study examined the complex structural relationships between the factors that influence L2 writing in more and less cognitively demanding tasks. To this end, 298 10th graders were recruited from a local high school in Korea. Participants completed tasks measuring L1 and L2 writing skills, L2 reading comprehension, L2 proficiency, L2…