First-year composition courses must balance a range of writing instruction priorities including genre and audience awareness with language instruction, particularly for second-language writers. Despite the attested efficacy of "dynamic" written corrective feedback for language gains in intensive English programs, little research has…

Anxiety can affect learners' performance in several ways. It can be a helpful motivational tool to assist students in learning a language. At the same time, anxiety can become a serious factor in hindering language acquisition. This study examines the relationship between students' writing performance and anxiety levels across three different…

This article presents a qualitative study of the differential uptake of SFL-inspired metalanguage and SFL-based pedagogy by two senior secondary history teachers in Australia. The teachers were involved in design-based research aimed at improving disciplinary writing for high stakes examinations. While both attended the same training seminar and…

This article reports on two quasi-experimental studies that investigated the possible development and transfer of audience awareness in novice EFL writers as they engaged in online writing tasks through a Social Networking Service (SNS). Japanese students from two universities were asked to write, read, and comment on other students' writing once…

This study investigated the impact of conversational agent formality on the quality of summaries and formality of written summaries during the training session and on posttest in a trialog-based intelligent tutoring system (ITS). During training, participants learned summarization strategies with the guidance of conversational agents who spoke one…

Much research work on teacher feedback has concentrated on the perceptions of students and teachers on feedback, but few studies have addressed the extent to which students respond to their teachers' written feedback, particularly at the tertiary level. This study analysed the extent to which students made appropriate revisions based on the…

This study investigates how university instructors from various disciplines at a large, comprehensive university in the United States evaluate different varieties of English from countries considered "outer circle" (OC) countries, formerly colonized countries where English has been transplanted and is now used unofficially and officially…

If assignments are to present clear arguments that a reader may follow without confusion or rereading, learners need to master a range of thematic options and employ them in proportions appropriate to the target genre. This paper builds upon recent theoretical work on a) genre differences in terms of thematisation between two British newspapers,…

The 5th International Conference on Language, Literature and Culture has been hosted by Mehmet Akif Ersoy University (Burdur, Turkey), in cooperation with Çankaya University (Ankara, Turkey) and Süleyman Demirel University (Isparta, Turkey). Our main aim has been to provide a forum for discussion, to facilitate integration in these fields, and to…

An English teacher provides some sentence comparison activities that enlarge students' linguistic resources for writing. He believes that students can learn to revise for style if they recognize the stylistic choices writers make.

A researcher examined the numbers of relative clauses and the percentages of subordinate clauses that relative clauses comprise in two sets of research reports (one set from the period 1893-1901 and the other from 1980) about spectroscopy from the "Physical Review." He analyzed some striking differences between the sets in patterns of…

A series of three experiments obtained objective measures of skilled and unskilled writing that was prepared in response to a potentially hostile audience. The principal differences between the two groups of writers were that skilled writers were far more likely than unskilled writers to go beyond the narrow constraints of the task, to generate…

Writers and writing teachers should be wary of depending on readability indexes as indicators of the difficulty of written messages. The Gunning Fog Index and the Damerst Clear Index, two readability formulas, were used to determine the readability of "A Statement of Editorial Policy" and two abstracts appearing in an issue of…

An approach to writing instruction in a second language begins with a look at the different functions of oral and written language and proceeds to an analysis of stylistic differences. A number of examples are offered from French textbooks, letters, and excerpts from speech used on television. (MSE)

A study investigated whether male and female tutors, as institutional representatives, use the same pragmatic features in their language. Ten graduate-student writing tutors, five male and five female, were recorded in sessions with both male and female students at a university writing center. Transcripts were analyzed for turn transition type…