During the pandemic of Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), English as a foreign language (EFL) students have to study and submit their assignments and quizzes through online systems using electronic files instead of hardcopies. This has created an opportunity for teachers to use computer tools to conduct preliminary assessment of the students'…

Metadiscourse is a tool for writers to guide and interact with readers through texts. Yet in most student texts, one of the points lacking is the interaction between writers and readers. In this study, frequency and type of interactive and interactional metadiscourse features were explored via students' research-based essays based on Hyland's…

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…

The Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy (CCSS-ELA) were adopted by approximately forty states (though in some cases, with significant revisions). However, researchers are still trying to understand how teachers are implementing the CCSS-ELA at the ground level--that is, in actual ELA classrooms. The CCSS-ELA call for…

This paper reports the design of learning-oriented formative assessments in an EFL writing course that involved learners in regularly responding to teacher feedback. Following major assessment and feedback frameworks developed recently, these formative assessments were explicated in three aspects: the scheduling of learning and assessment…

Although the importance of summary writing is well documented in prior studies, few have investigated the evaluation of written summaries. Due to the complex nature of L2 summary writing, which requires one to read the original material and summarize its content in the L2, raters often emphasize different features when judging the quality of L2…

This study examined the effects of an intervention in writing with digital interactive books. To improve the writing skills of seventh- and eighth-grade students with a learning disability in reading, we conducted a quasi-experimental study in which the students read interactive digital books (i-books), took notes, wrote summaries, and acted as…