Most massive open online courses (MOOC) use simple schemes for aggregating peer grades, taking the mean or the median, or compute weights from information other than the instructor's opinion about the students' knowledge. To reduce the difference between the instructor and students' aggregated scores, some proposals compute specific weights to…

In this dissertation, I present findings from a qualitative research project designed to articulate practitioner-teachers' beliefs about writing and their role in providing feedback on student writing in online courses. To analyze the qualities of these beliefs, I interviewed eight full-time and part-time teachers from multiple disciplines…

Students at all grade levels in the United States are experiencing significant difficulties in the area of written expression (Salahu-Din, Persky, & Miller, 2008; U.S. Department of Education, 2012). Although performance feedback is an effective evidence-based intervention for improving the writing fluency of elementary-aged students,…

Second language (L2) writing teaching and research in China have enjoyed a rich history and have had remarkable achievements. However, the extensive L2 writing literature created in China has not yet been analyzed comprehensively from theoretical, methodological, and philosophical perspectives. This research synthesis provides a metadisciplinary…

Investigating lexical richness is a continuing concern within vocabulary studies. The present study aims to contribute to this growing area of research by exploring EFL learners' free active vocabulary by dividing them into groups based on their receptive vocabulary. It seeks to explain the role of different essay types and proficiency levels…

There are increasing calls for the UCAS personal statement to be reformed. These calls are based on the claim that the current personal statement gives unfair advantages to more privileged applicants within higher education admissions. While this topic has attracted political attention, there is much about the personal statement that remains…

There is quite a bit of evidence showing that the experience of learning an L2 will help in learning an L3, but as far as we know, very little research has investigated the possible impact of L3 learning on the already existing and still developing L2 system within the learner. According to Complex Dynamic Systems Theory (CDST), language…

Acquisition of an additional language is assumed to involve several internal and external factors for the learner. Among external factors, instructional procedures and materials are vital in helping learners master L2 skills. This study investigates how the instructor's instructional variables and in-house materials influence tertiary-level Omani…

Being a configuration of logically interconnected statements realized in moves and stages, an argumentative essay is built around the notion of textual unity achieved through lexico-grammar and semantic associations. The study attempted to analyze the role of cohesion in the rhetorical structure of undergraduate EFL students. Hence, the 13 moves…

Discourse competence is an essential component of communicative competence and central to the mastery of academic writing. This article reports a three-tiered diagnostic assessment of two English as a foreign language (EFL) student writers' discourse competence in terms of textual features, composing strategies, and knowledge about academic…

The purpose of this work is to observe and analyze if a group of thirty students of an integrated English e-course could benefit from the explicit teaching of five lexical groups and the pedagogical principles behind the Lexical Approach. These low-intermediate students (CEFR, A2) took an Integrated English e-course at the School of Modern…

Although the effect of teacher and peer feedback on writing improvement in the field of second language teaching has been discussed in scholarly research for several decades, student engagement with both forms of feedback integrated into a sequence of discovery, correction and revision remains under-researched. This study investigates the impact…

Conditional sentences are difficult for EFL students to understand because of their complexity in both form and function. By analyzing the performances and opinions among EFL learners, the pedagogical contribution may be beneficial for both EFL students and teachers. The use, errors, and perceptions of Thai EFL students regarding conditional…

A compelling body of evidence suggests that EFL students have problem with logical connectors' appropriate use in writing. This study explored Iranian EFL students' adversative connectors use in their essay writing course. To this end, a Learner Corpus of 60393 words consisting of 156 essays was compiled. LOCNESS was chosen as the criterion…

A writer's L1 is generally believed to influence their L2 English writing significantly. However, the extent to which L1 backgrounds influence Asian learners' L2 English writing has not been wholly elucidated due to the lack of data covering various learners in Asia. Therefore, this study analysed more than one-million-word essays written by 2,318…