The Attention, Relevance, Confidence, and Satisfaction (ARCS) model provides a basis for integrating motivational dynamics and technological affordances into the design and implementation of instructions to maintain learner motivation and interest. Little attention has been paid to this potential in teaching the complex and often demotivating…

While social networking sites (SNSs) have attracted growing scholarly interest in uncovering L2 learners' participation within these sites, the impact of writing on SNSs upon students' writing performance and learner autonomy remains underexplored. This study reported on a college EFL writing course participated by two groups of Chinese first-year…

This study set out to examine which peer review, face-to-face given orally or online given in writing, is more effective in improving the overall argumentative writing achievement of English as a foreign language (EFL) university learners. The study utilized an experimental design and reported on one experiment including online peer review (OLPR)…

The following review incorporates a systematic selection, coding, and analysis methodology in order to compile a corpus of empirical research studies that investigate the use of technology-mediated feedback in L2 writing contexts published from 2015-2019. Trends are identified by coding and quantitatively analyzing key parameters of the corpus,…

Many studies that have investigated the educational value of online machine translation (MT) in second language (L2) writing generally report significant improvements after MT use, but no study as of yet has comprehensively analyzed the effectiveness of MT use in terms of various measures in syntactic complexity, accuracy, lexical complexity, and…

AWCF can facilitate academic writing development, especially for novice writers of English as a foreign language (EFL). Existing AWCF studies mainly focus on teacher and learner perceptions; fewer have investigated the error-correction effect of AWCF and factors related to the effect. Especially lacking is research on how successfully students can…

Web-based collaborative writing (CW) has been widely used in the field of English as a foreign language (EFL) during the last decade. Previous studies have mainly focused on how online platforms have facilitated the CW process for EFL learners, how web-based CW has shown progress in EFL learners' writing development, and how EFL learners in groups…

In this study, the participants learned English as a foreign language (EFL) in the classroom and then worked on five learning tasks to apply their newly learned knowledge to unfamiliar environments. The participants took photos of people, objects, situations or scenarios and described them in detail using a mobile learning system. Familiarization…

This study investigates the extent to which microfeatures -- such as basic text features, readability, cohesion, and lexical diversity based on specific word lists -- affect Chinese EFL writing quality. Data analysis was conducted using natural language processing, correlation analysis and stepwise multiple regression analysis on a corpus of 268…

This study investigates the impact on extemporaneous English-language first drafts by using Google Translate (GT) in three different tasks assigned to Chinese sophomore, junior, and senior students of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) majoring in English. Students wrote first in Chinese (Step 1), then drafted corresponding texts in English (Step…

Although the effectiveness of computer-mediated collaborative writing (CMCW) is confirmed by many recent studies, only a few have investigated whether linguistic knowledge and writing skills learned through collaboration can be internalized and transferred to individual writing. This study uses a pre-and post-test design to investigate the impact…

Drawing on Vygotskian sociocultural theory of mind and social constructivism, and adopting a sequential exploratory mixed-methods approach, this study explored the impact of online dynamic assessment (DA) on EFL learners' academic writing skills through one-on-one individual and online synchronous DA sessions over Google Docs. It also investigated…

Paraphrasing, or restating information using different words, is critical to successful writing. However, EFL learners have difficulty in making paraphrases to meet their writing demands, and there has been little research on developing automatic reference tools to assist these learners' paraphrasing skills for better writing quality. In this…

Facebook has best leveraged the rapid technological and societal changes over the past decade to grow into the world's largest social-networking site (SNS). However, research of Facebook has lagged behind other Web 2.0 technologies, particularly in regards to investigating its efficacy versus a control group to improve L2 writing. This study,…

Expressing causal relations plays a central role in academic writing. While it is important that writing instructors assess and provide feedback on learners' causal discourse, it could be a very time-consuming task. In this respect, automated writing evaluation (AWE) tools may be helpful. However, to date, there have been no AWE tools capable of…