The goal of this study is to model pauses extracted from writing keystroke logs as a way of characterizing the processes students use in essay composition. Low-level timing data were modeled, the interkey interval and its subtype, the intraword duration, thought to reflect processes associated with keyboarding skills and composition fluency.…

Recent research in English language is descriptive, evaluative and analytical. It is quantitative and qualitative in nature, which aims at investigating theme development methods/techniques employed by Palestinian tertiary level EFL learners in performing written discourse. The study is an attempt to analyze the written product of 120 Palestinian…

Research on adult writers has shown that writing proceeds through bursts of transcription activity interspersed by long pauses. Yet few studies have examined how these writing behaviors unfold during early and middle childhood. This study traces the progress of bursts, pauses, transcription, and written composition in Portuguese students from…

Task-based planning can be conceptualized as the opportunity to work out task performance before the actual performance. It allows learners to process the content and language of their planned production at a deeper and more meaningful level. In the face of the wide range of research conducted on the effects of pre-task planning on L2 production,…

Developed to evaluate secondary school students' writing fluency skills, this study is descriptive in nature and uses a mixed method approach. During the research, the researcher attempted to identify students' abilities to write in terms of quantity and complexity, on the one hand, and also attempted to identify findings on accuracy, the…

This study addresses the current debate about the beneficial effects of text processing software on students with different working memory (WM) during the process of academic writing, especially with regard to the ability to display higher-level conceptual thinking. A total of 54 graduate students (15 male, 39 female) wrote one essay by hand and…

Using computer keystroke logs, this study investigated how writing skill affected L2 writers' pausing patterns to gain insights into their management of the cognitive writing processes. The 59 participants, 29 in the more-skilled group and 30 in the less-skilled group, were recruited from a college English course at a key Chinese university. The…

The present study aimed at characterizing what skilled or more proficient ESL college writing is in the Philippine setting through a contrastive analysis of three groups of variables identified from previous studies: resources, processes, and performance of ESL writers. Based on Chenoweth and Hayes' (2001; 2003) framework, the resource level…

Classroom teachers sometimes struggle trying to find time during the typical school day to provide the writing instruction students need to be successful. This study examined 29 fifth through twelfth grade classroom teachers' survey responses about their perception of the effectiveness of using an online blogging tool, Kidblog, to plan and provide…

Students with and without learning disabilities (LD) struggle with the written expression process, from planning and organization (e.g., prewriting) to actually writing an essay. For students with LD, challenges in written expression are more intensive than their typical peers. Without effective written expression supports and instruction, such as…

This study investigates the effects of using an online Automated Essay Assessing (AEA) system on EFL graduate students' writing. Eighty four EFL graduate students divided into the treatment group and the control group participated in this study. The treatment group was asked to use an AEA system to assist their essay writing. Both groups were…

Little is known about the effects of various planning and revising conditions on composition quality in experimental or TESOL education research. This study examined the effects of planning conditions (planning, prolonged planning, free writing, and control), subplanning conditions (task-given, task-content-given, and…

This study contributes to L2 writing research which seeks to tie predictions of the Limited Attentional Capacity Model (Skehan, 1998; Skehan & Foster, 2001) and Cognition Hypothesis (Robinson, 2001, 2005, 2011a, 2011b) to models of working memory in L1 writing (Kellogg, 1996). The study uses a quasi-experimental research design to investigate…

This study investigated cognitive factors that might influence Chinese EFL learners' argumentative essay writing in English. The factors that were explored included English (L2) language proficiency, Chinese (L1) writing ability, genre knowledge, use of writing strategies, and working memory capacity in L1 and L2. Data were collected from 136…

A study analyzed the second-language essays of seven anglophone and one French-speaking Quebec university students enrolled in a literature course by using a cognitive-metacognitive framework developed for mathematical problem-solving and a think-aloud protocol. Results indicate the framework, with some adjustments, is a reliable tool for…