This study explored the relationship between task complexity, textual emotionality, and linguistic complexity in second language (L2) writing. Fifty-eight L2 English learners performed simple and complex versions of an argumentative writing task manipulated along with resource-­directing variables. The essays were first analysed for textual…

This article focuses on the 2019 National Monitoring Study of Student Achievement (NMSSA) assessment of student ability in writing. It begins with an overview of the study and its results, then turns to students' use of planning strategies to support their writing. Drawing on research on the association between planning and achievement in writing,…

To test the predictive power of the SSARC (stabilize, simplify, automatize, reconstruct, and complexify) model of pedagogic task sequencing in second language (L2) writing development, the present study explores the performance of written decision-making tasks with varied levels of cognitive complexity in a simple-to-complex sequence in comparison…

The purpose of this study is to analyse how vocabulary depth develops in the early years of primary school and to ascertain the effect it has on the quality of the texts produced by the students. A total of 332 Spanish students from the first to fourth grades participated by doing a synonyms/antonyms task to evaluate their vocabulary depth, along…

Integrated tasks are popularly known and accepted as an effective way of improving students' writing quality. However, it is still not clear to what really accounts for its effectiveness. This study examined whether the students who were facilitated by integrated task achieved higher writing quality than those who were not. Twenty - two students…

This study was motivated by Skehan's (1996, 1998) hypothesis about the potential of post-task anticipation to direct learners' attention towards form and previous online L2 collaborative writing research that found prioritization of meaning in this context. It investigated the effects of post-task anticipation on text length, accuracy and…

Many international students in American universities are required to take writing courses in English as a second language (ESL) before participating in a mainstream first-year composition (FYC) course. Given that the goal of ESL writing course is to prepare students for FYC course, the connection between ESL and FYC courses is significant. This…

We conducted a skills analysis on written expression curriculum-based measurement (WE-CBM) tasks completed by 117 second-grade students. As part of the skills analysis, we scored two WE-CBM tasks (i.e., narrative and expository) for correct and incorrect writing sequences, common writing errors, and sentence structures. Although a majority of…

A great number of investigations have focused on the subject of task rehearsal (repetition) and its likely influence on language learning. Giving language (L2) learners an opportunity to repeat the task may help them to redistribute their focus on form, since they have already become fairly familiar with the content. Several studies have also…

Recent research on expert teachers suggests that an integrated understanding across the core domains of teachers' knowledge is crucial for their professional competence. However, in initial teacher education pre-service teachers seem to struggle with the integration of knowledge represented in multiple domain-specific sources into a coherent…

Economic education is an essential prerequisite for coping with economic-characterised problems in various life spheres, especially with socio-economic problems in the societal sphere. Making informed and reasoned decisions on socio-economic problems requires domain-specific content knowledge and domain-specific argumentation skills. Economic…

This cross-sectional study compares the written language of Thai EFL students in their first two years of university study. First- and second-year students (N = 170) wrote opinion paragraphs by hand in response to six prompts. Using automated textual analysis tools, clausal (subordination), phrasal (coordinated phrases and complex nominals), and…

This book is the first edited volume to compile up-to-date scholarship that discusses frontier knowledge on second language (L2) collaborative writing (CW) and highlights technology-mediated solutions to it. The volume consists of conceptual papers and empirical studies that explore theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical approaches to CW in…

This study investigated the effects of strategic planning and task structure (personal, narrative, and decision-making tasks) on L2 writing outcomes. One hundred and twenty intermediate English as a foreign language learners were randomly divided into strategic-planning and no-planning-time groups. The strategic-planning group performed the three…

Researchers and practitioners have questioned whether scoring procedures used with curriculum-based measures of writing (CBM-W) capture growth in complexity of writing. We analyzed data from six independent samples to examine two potential scoring metrics for picture word CBM-W (PW), a sentence-level CBM task. Correct word sequences per response…