PhD researchers are increasingly working in non-academic sectors, garnering interest in the extent to which doctoral education is relevant for careers beyond academia. Writing, arguably the most important and challenging activity PhDs must master, is a skill also coveted in the knowledge economy, required of employees across labour sectors. Using…

With the advent of new technologies, assessment research has adopted technology-based methods to investigate test validity. This study investigated the neurocognitive processes involved in an academic listening comprehension test, using a biometric technique called functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). Sixteen right-handed university…

In successful writing development, English as a foreign language (EFL) learners not only need to acquire grammatical complexity (GC) features but also know when and how to use them flexibly across communicative contexts, known as register flexibility. The present study, guided by the sociocultural theory of language learning, examines descriptive…

Complex noun phrases (NP) are central to mature academic writing and often a focus of explicit teaching. The National Curriculum in England, for example, requires specific components of NP complexity to be taught at specific educational stages. However, the evidence base for such practices is unclear. Research on the emergence of NP components is…

This paper describes a close-up investigation of four advanced language learners' engagement with strategy instruction (SI) materials specially designed to enhance efforts to fine-tune comprehension and production of academic vocabulary. The learners first completed a measure of learning style, and then provided introspective and retrospective…

Due to the advances of artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing, new AI-powered writing tools have emerged. They can be used by students among other things for text translation, to improve spelling or to generate new texts. In academic writing, AI-powered writing tools are posing challenges but also opportunities for teaching…

Strategic competence, or the cognitive resources necessary for utilizing language knowledge, is widely recognized as an essential component of second language (L2) ability. However, research on strategic competence in the context of L2 speaking assessment has been limited, and findings have been inconsistent, making it challenging to discern the…

A key purpose of the Foundation Year provision is to prepare students, often from a widening participation background, for their undergraduate study. Research has established that access to academic discourse and disciplinary knowledge is, to a large extent, dependent on students' academic language and literacy skills, including oracy skills.…

This essay examines a case study that investigated how students learned and how they applied their writing skills as they pursued publication in an undergraduate scientific journal at a Canadian university. As we conducted a genre analysis of student drafts submitted to the journal and interviewed students who published in the journal's inaugural…

The present study explored the impact of mobile-assisted self-regulated learning (SRL) on developing university students' knowledge of academic vocabulary in English. The participants were 49 students in experimental (N = 28) and control (N = 21) learning conditions. Those in the experimental group studied 70 academic words using digital…

This research aims to present a number of findings on the perception that university students have on academic plagiarism. Data has been collected on the procedures of copy and paste, paraphrase, translation, as well as the need for citation of resources taken from the Internet. This study was carried out at the University of Lleida (UdL), via an…

Since the turn of the millennium there has been a clear rise in the implementation and research of mindfulness across primary, secondary and postsecondary education. These implementations, however, hardly constitute a uniform phenomenon. They reflect a variety of framings, modalities and educational aims, as documented in hundreds of peer-reviewed…

This paper presents a conceptual commentary on interdisciplinary sequencing, an idea proposed to interlink and interconnect the academic variables from multidisciplinary studies. Interdisciplinary sequencing connects academic variables through reasonable consensus on common grounds. Literature published in the Journal of Interdisciplinary Sciences…

The researchers have asserted thesis writing's important role and demanding nature for EFL postgraduate students. However, the experience of writing an EFL postgraduate thesis in non-native English-speaking contexts has been relatively neglected. Besides, most of the previous studies have been confined to genre analysis or text-based…

Academic writing is a key determinant to be successful in higher education institutions, and graduation requirements often involve students producing theses and dissertations using academic writing skills after conducting research. The COVID-19 pandemic has greatly affected pre-service teachers' learning in higher education institutions, and with…