This study explores undergraduate students' use of ChatGPT when writing essays. Three students were tasked with writing two essays each for a coursework component for a Cambridge qualification facilitated by access to ChatGPT. After writing the essays, they participated in semi-structured interviews about their experiences of using the technology.…

This paper presents a multidimensional model of variation in writing quality, register, and genre in student essays, trained and tested via confirmatory factor analysis of 1.37 million essay submissions to ETS' digital writing service, Criterion®. The model was also validated with several other corpora, which indicated that it provides a…

Preservice teacher candidates acquire and develop numerous competencies in their teaching programs, including how to teach writing. Effective writing instruction is critical across all ages and content areas, especially when working with students with and at risk of emotional and behavioral disorders, making it an important aspect of teacher…

The authors discuss the issues and benefits of collaborative writing in journalistic education, comparing the texts written by students in different conditions: in group collaboration, individually after prewriting group discussion, and individually without any collaboration. We used a survey for collecting both quantitative and qualitative data.…

Evaluating the impact of Academic Literacies teaching (Lea and Street [1998. "Student Writing in Higher Education: An Academic Literacies Approach." "Studies in Higher Education" 23 (2): 157-72. doi:10.1080/03075079812331380364]) is difficult, as it involves gauging whether writers: (1) gain better understanding of what…

Language learners today have access to a much wider choice of resources and language-support tools that aid their writing processes. While research on the convenience and flexibility of the writing resources that learners use in real-life writing activities have argued for a re-conceptualization of writing ability, little is known about the effect…

Low retention rates in college is a policy concern for US postsecondary institutions, and writing is a critical competency for college (Graham, 2019). This paper describes an exploratory writing analytics study at six 4-year universities aimed at gaining insights about the relationship between college retention and writing. Findings suggest that…

Metadiscourse comprises the linguistic resources used by writers to organize texts, engage readers, project stances towards their texts or readers, or position themselves in relation to readers (e.g. "I suggest," "however," "for example," "perhaps," "it is clear that," "interesting").…

While there are benefits to collaborative research, navigating group dynamics can also bring challenges, particularly for doctoral students and early career academics who are new to the research process. These dynamics extend beyond initial manuscript submission and include processes associated with interpreting reviewer comments, deciding upon…

This literature review looked at relevant research articles published in reputable journals from 2018 to 2022 to try to shed light on the areas: (1) Implications of using thematic progression pattern to improve the coherence and unity of student essays; and (2) The effects of thematic problems using the thematic progression approach in the…

The present study examined the extent to which adaptive feedback and just-in-time writing strategy instruction improved the quality of high school students' persuasive essays in the context of the Writing Pal (W-Pal). W-Pal is a technology-based writing tool that integrates automated writing evaluation into an intelligent tutoring system. Students…

The present study examined the extent to which adaptive feedback and just-in-time writing strategy instruction improved the quality of high school students' persuasive essays in the context of the Writing Pal (W-Pal). W-Pal is a technology-based writing tool that integrates automated writing evaluation into an intelligent tutoring system. Students…

Purpose: This paper aims to show how an Academic Literacies lens can contribute to a deeper understanding of writing for a professional doctorate (PD) by focusing both on the language of supervisors' written feedback and on student and supervisor perspectives on feedback throughout Year 1 (Y1). Design/methodology/approach: Firstly, written…

Syntactic complexity has long been used to gauge language learners' performance, proficiency, and development, offering language teachers valid recommendations for syllabus design and materials development. Progress in syntactic complexity research foreshadows the imperative of measuring syntactic features at a high level of granularity, which…

The application of Automated Writing Evaluation (AWE) has recently gained researchers' attention worldwide. However, the impact of AWE feedback on student writing, particularly in languages other than English, remains controversial. This study aimed to compare the impacts of Chinese AWE feedback and teacher feedback on Chinese writing revision,…