This study examines the potential to use non-expert, crowd-sourced raters to score essays by comparing expert raters' and crowd-sourced raters' assessments of writing quality. Expert raters and crowd-sourced raters scored 400 essays using a standardised holistic rubric and comparative judgement (pairwise ratings) scoring techniques, respectively.…

Drawing upon research on the ways texts work as communication across different disciplines, this study investigated teacher and student feedback practices on three different patterns of writing: comparison-contrast essays, opinion essays, and cause-and-effect essays. The data were collected through three qualitative techniques: interviews, class…

This study introduces a mobile-assisted Seamless Chinese Vocabulary Learning (SCVL) framework and examines its efficacy through the implementation of a "sentence-paragraph-essay" artifact-making writing process designed to enhance vocabulary growth among tertiary-level students. Employing a design-based research methodology, the study…

This article examined student experiences before and after an essay writing assignment that required the use of ChatGPT within an undergraduate engineering course. Utilizing a pre-post study design, we gathered data from 24 participants to evaluate ChatGPT's support for both completing and grading an essay assignment, exploring its educational…

The purpose of this study was to explore the nature of interactions among second/foreign language (L2) writing subskills. Two types of relationships were investigated: subskill-item and subskill-subskill relationships. To achieve the first purpose, using writing data obtained from the writing essays of 500 English as a foreign language (EFL)…

Investigating links between temporal features of the writing process (e.g., bursts and pauses during writing) and the linguistic features found in written products would help us better understand intersections between the writing process and product. However, research on this topic is rare. This article illustrates a method to examine associations…

This study explored a way to help Japanese university students write longer essays while maintaining grammatical accuracy. Participants were three groups of students enrolled in a one-year EFL course in different academic years (N = 111), and the number of words they wrote in 30 minutes and the number of errors made per 100 words were compared. To…

The mixed-method study firstly drew on regression analysis to check what influential variables were in constructing authorial voice of 45 Chinese MTI students (postgraduates) in an EFL writing course, and then based upon quantitative findings, qualitatively examined how students' EFL writing may resonate with voice teaching in the course with data…

Automated Writing Evaluation systems have been developed to help students improve their writing skills through the automated delivery of both summative and formative feedback. These systems have demonstrated strong potential in a variety of educational contexts; however, they remain limited in their personalization and scope. The purpose of the…

In this article, I present the results of a national study of response to student writing and argue for an approach to response I call "Responding for Transfer" (RFT). My corpus includes peer and teacher responses to 1,054 rough and final drafts of student writing from across the curriculum as well as 128 student self-reflection essays…

Much of the research that has examined the writing knowledge of school-age students has relied on interviews to ascertain this information, which is problematic because interviews may underestimate breadth and depth of writing knowledge, require lengthy interactions with participants, and do not permit a direct evaluation of a prescribed array of…

Research in metadiscourse has foregrounded the multiple ways in which writers build a relationship with readers through internal discourse. Yet, few studies consider the relationship between the texts writers create and the metalinguistic thinking which informs their decision-making as writers. This paper draws on data from a larger study which…

Scenario-based writing assessment has two salient characteristics by design: a lead-in/essay scaffolding structure and a unified scenario/topic throughout. In this study, we examine whether the scenario-based assessment design would impact students' essay scores compared to its alternative conditions, which intentionally broke the scaffolding…

This study examined the forms and functions of reformulation markers (RMs) in the three disciplines of philosophy, economics, and biology to see whether there is any disciplinary variation regarding these linguistic devices and their functions in essays written by undergraduate students. To this purpose, two corpora of university students' essays…

Current writing support tools tend to focus on assessing final or intermediate products, rather than the writing process. However, sensing technologies, such as keystroke logging, can enable provision of automated feedback during, and on aspects of, the writing process. Despite this potential, little is known about the critical indicators that can…