Syntactic complexity has been recognized as an important construct in writing research, and for the past five decades, many syntactic complexity measures (SCMs) have been examined in numerous studies. This systematic review is the first study of its kind to synthesize 36 studies spanning from 1970 to 2019 by identifying and cataloging all SCMs…

Dynamic written corrective feedback (DWCF) is a pedagogical approach that offers meaningful, manageable, constant, and timely corrective feedback on student writing (Hartshorn et al., 2010). It emphasizes indirect and comprehensive written error correction on short, daily writing assignments. Numerous studies have demonstrated that its use can…

The purpose of this study is to explore the reliability of a potentially more practical approach to direct writing assessment in the context of ESL writing. Traditional rubric rating (RR) is a common yet resource-intensive evaluation practice when performed reliably. This study compared the traditional rubric model of ESL writing assessment and…

Writing assessment is a key feature of most education systems, yet there are limitations with traditional methods of assessing writing involving rubrics. In contrast, comparative judgement appears to overcome the reliability issues that beset the assessment of performance assessment tasks. The approach presented here extends previous work on…

Writing achievement is a complex skill set as characterized by the sociocognitive writing framework, including writing domain knowledge (e.g., sentence structure), general cognitive skills (e.g., critical thinking) and intra- (e.g., interest) and interpersonal (e.g., collaboration) subfactors. During students' postsecondary careers, they need to…

This corpus-based study investigates lexical richness in English writing by Chinese senior high school students. Lexical uses in 303 compositions were compared across three grades in terms of lexical sophistication, variation, density and errors. Timed compositions were sampled from Writing Corpus of English Learners, and the sample sizes of three…

Teaching academic writing to English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students poses significant challenges, often requiring instructors to adapt their instructional strategies to effectively meet learners' diverse needs and contexts. This study investigates the impact of an adapted process genre writing model, enhanced with teacher-prepared materials,…

This study aims to develop a robust rubric for evaluating artificial intelligence (AI)--assisted essay writing in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) contexts. Employing a modified Delphi technique, we conducted a comprehensive literature review and administered Likert scale questionnaires. This process yielded nine key evaluation criteria,…

This study explores the effectiveness of using ChatGPT, an Artificial Intelligence (AI) language model, as an Automated Essay Scoring (AES) tool for grading English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners' essays. The corpus consists of 50 essays representing various types including analysis, compare and contrast, descriptive, narrative, and opinion…

This study investigates task-specific emotions, examining how they arise and impact performance in a second language writing task through the lens of control-value theory and a positive psychology (PP) perspective. Participants were 206 secondary English-as-a-foreign-language learners from rural China. They completed an English argumentative…

The mixed-method study firstly drew on regression analysis to check what influential variables were in constructing authorial voice of 45 Chinese MTI students (postgraduates) in an EFL writing course, and then based upon quantitative findings, qualitatively examined how students' EFL writing may resonate with voice teaching in the course with data…

In recent years, there has been a growing trend of using informal styles in academic writing, including research articles. To examine the degree of formality in students' writing, this corpus-based study aimed to analyze the formal linguistic features in the academic writing assignments of English-major students at a Thai university. The learner…

The study examined the enhancement of EFL Thai undergraduates' narrative paragraph writing through extensive reading (ER) and investigated the attitudes of EFL Thai undergraduate students towards ER. Forty-nine non-English major students at a public university in Thailand participated in the study over ten weeks. Two experimental groups were…

A prompt can be used as a medium to help students write a descriptive text. There is a lack of research on the type of prompts which can help students formulate and organize their ideas. Therefore, this study aims to determine whether there was a significant difference in the score of idea formulation and organization in a descriptive text between…

The construct of cognitive discourse functions (CDFs) has been proposed as a bridge between linguists and educationalists, linking 'subject specific cognitive learning goals with the linguistic representations they receive in classroom interaction' (Dalton-Puffer 2013. "A Construct of Cognitive Discourse Functions for Conceptualising…