Background: Identifying high-quality teachers at the point of hire can reduce later costs in the form of teacher attrition and minimize the attrition impact on school organizations and student learning. There have been many studies paying attention to the topic of improving the system for selecting and hiring teachers (Bruno & Strunk, 2019;…

This study investigated lexical complexity in English language teaching (ELT) students' essays across genres and over the course of time. The essays included descriptive, compare and contrast, advantage and disadvantage, and argumentative genres. Employing a longitudinal, quasi-experimental and repeated measures design in a year-long writing…

Students' writing proficiency is measured through holistic and analytical ratings in writing assessment; however, recent studies suggest that measurement of syntactic complexity in second language writing research has become an effective measure of writing proficiency. Within this paradigm, we investigated how automated measurement of syntactic…

Characterized by specific and rigid boundaries of institutional practices and expectations in the academy, student writing is a synergistic literacy practice where students are required to construct generically diverse texts by yoking concepts with appropriate linguistic resources. This empirical study involving 196 first-year ESL students at a…

The present study examined the effect of language background and topic on productive formulaic competence. Guided by usage-based theory of language learning, this study used a distribution-based approach to the examination of the native-likeness of formulaic usage in English timed argumentative writing. Six indices informed by a large-scale native…

With the increasing use of mobile phones among young people, there is growing public concern about possible detrimental effects of digital writing on learners' literacy and language skills. We ask whether and to what extent nonstandard forms typical of spoken Hebrew and of digital communication are also found in the formal writing of high-school…

Nursing education is transitioning from traditional teaching to competency-based education. Additionally, more nursing courses and programs are now offered online. Scholarly writing is a powerful strategy to teach effective communication and critical thinking, both core competencies for safe and effective nursing practice. However, teaching…

Based on the theoretical approaches to interlanguage and discourse cohesiveness, this study examines international students' growth in discourse awareness and discourse competence in the teaching of elementary Chinese reading and writing, and explores a set of assessment methods for teaching discourse. The learners' knowledge and production of…

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…

This study used a mixed methods research design to investigate use of Web-based lexicographic tools during real-time second language (L2) writing activity in an English as a foreign language university context and the impact of their use on writing quality. Participants included 22 adult Japanese EFL learners, elementary to advanced language…

Our purpose in this study is to propose a voice model which provides a framework to analyse how student writers construct their authorial identities through the voices they employ in their texts and to test the effectiveness of the Lehman's rubric design as a measure of authorial voice. The voice model, which features individualised, collective…

We present an empirical study on the use of keystroke analytics to capture and understand how writers manage their time and make inferences on how they allocate their cognitive resources during essay writing. The results suggest three distinct longitudinal patterns of writing process that describe how writers approach an essay task in a writing…

With technological advancements, Automated Writing Evaluation (AWE) has garnered increasing interest in L2 writing research, significantly enhancing our understanding of AWE tools' practices and efficacy in L2 writing instruction. However, the relationships between feedback types (teacher vs. AWE) and different dimensions of engagement (cognitive…

This article provides three major contributions to the literature: we provide granular information on the development of student argumentative writing across secondary school; we replicate the MacArthur et al. model of Natural Language Processing (NLP) writing features that predict quality with a younger group of students; and we are able to…

The critical role of teachers suggests that assessing teacher identity construction helps teacher educators understand the changes in teachers and design materials in harmony with their needs in teacher education programs. However, only a few studies have focused on assessing pre-service teachers' identity in the long term in Iran. To address this…