One of the most significant and yet often overlooked challenges for university students is decoding what their instructors expect from their assignments. Better understanding those expectations and the vocabulary and grammar needed to achieve them are the motivations behind this investigation. Eleven experienced instructors within an Australian…

In recent years, there has been a growing trend of using informal styles in academic writing, including research articles. To examine the degree of formality in students' writing, this corpus-based study aimed to analyze the formal linguistic features in the academic writing assignments of English-major students at a Thai university. The learner…

This study was conducted at a university based in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. The purpose of the study was to determine if the explicit instruction of selected grammar aspect, modal auxiliary verbs, improved students' ability to write English. The study was qualitative in nature and a case study design was adopted. The focus was in relation to a…

Written communication skills are often among the most important applied skills sought by employers when hiring graduates of colleges of agriculture. However, recent reports cite a gap between employers' expectations and graduates' levels of preparedness in key applied skills, among them "effective written communication." One critical…

This study examines the relationship between EFL students' noticing and three written feedback strategies. The convenience sampling method was adopted and four intact classes were randomly assigned into four groups: the model, the error correction, the reformulation, and the control groups. After the completion of picture-cued writing tasks as…

Although the behavior and impacts of instructor reflection in writing classes have been extensively studied over the past few decades, a significant proportion of the work has concentrated on students' attitudes and utilization of all such responses, as opposed to teachers' perspectives, self-assessments, and actual text comments given. Research…

This paper examines the English grammatical errors and their patterns in the written assignments of a General Education course at City University of Hong Kong. Subjects are 60 local and non-local (exchange) undergraduate students who are all L2 learners with diversified education and disciplinary background (i. e. their major of study) which are…

The current paper is a mixed method study which aimed to find out teacher written feedback preferences of a group of prep-class students at a public university in Turkey. The written corrective feedback preferences of 37 students with high level of proficiency in English were examined via a questionnaire and an interview. The study lasted for two…

This study examines a common pedagogical approach whereby students view teacher feedback outside of class time. Facilitated through Moodle, it aimed to investigate not only the effect of written corrective feedback (WCF) on learning outcomes, but importantly, how frequently students review the feedback they receive. The study was conducted at a…

Prior research has shown that EFL learners who wrote collaboratively with partners using wikis improved the content quality and language accuracy of their L2 individual writing more than students who wrote individually. Drawing on the dataset from Hsu and Lo's study, the current study explores the nature of the students' collaborative dialogue…

The study aimed at investigating the attitudes of Jordanian undergraduate students towards using computer assisted-language learning (CALL) and its effectiveness in the process of learning the English language. In order to fulfill the study's objective, the researchers used a questionnaire to collect data, followed-up with semi-structured…

To teach effective business communication, instructors must target students’ current weaknesses in writing. One method for doing so is by assigning writing exercises. When used heuristically, writing exercises encourage students to practice self-assessment, self-evaluation, active learning, and knowledge transfer, all while reinforcing the basics…

This study illustrates how a synergy of two technologies--Intelligent Computer-Assisted Language Learning (ICALL) and corpus linguistic analysis--can produce a lasting improvement in L2 learners' ability to edit persistent grammatical errors from their writing. A large written English corpus produced by Korean undergraduate and graduate students…

The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) at the Brigham Young University website has been used in the English as a Foreign language (EFL) classroom to help learners better understand how language works at different levels of analysis and also to develop their writing skills. However, it also allows learners to explore culture-related…

The current study explores how integrating a social networking website called Facebook with peer feedback in groups supports student learning, investigates the nature of feedback students received on their writing, and examines their attitudes towards the use of Facebook for peer feedback. The study involves 30 undergraduate students who…