"OpenEssayist" is an automated writing evaluation system (AWE) designed to provide immediate textual and graphical feedback to students to help them improve their academic writing. One of the graphical visualisations as part of "OpenEssayist," (named a 'rainbow diagram'), illustrates how well the key concepts within the writing…

Teacher-student group conferences (TSGCs) blend the benefits of one-to-one teacher-student writing conferences with those of peer response. TSGCs socialize student writers into discussions of academic writing, giving them an expert model (the teacher) and an opportunity to practice providing feedback to several peers. This article describes how…

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…

As a key component of fluent linguistic production, multi-word sequences called lexical bundles are considered an important distinguishing feature of discourse in different registers, genres, and disciplines. They are also an important aspect of empirically correct and proficient language use in a corpus of natural language because they enable…

The title for this article reflects the complex linguistic situation of the Anglophone Caribbean, where multiple English-lexifier Creoles (such as Jamaican Creole [Weh Wi Deh] and Bahamian Creole [Veh Vi Is])--all of which developed in the colonial era out of the contact between English and myriad African languages spoken by contemporary Caribbean…

This exploratory study aims to analyse the nature of peer feedback during a collaborative writing assignment, and to identify the possible effects of feedback on the revision of a text written by university students in a blended learning environment. Under analysis are two different graduate courses in academic writing, during which, over a period…

This article reports on student reactions to a relatively new method of giving feedback using a technique called 'screencasting'. Screencasting is a technique where the computer screen is captured in a video while an audio recording is being made. In this way, students can receive oral feedback in conjunction with written corrective feedback.…

Research shows that acquisition of writing skills can be supported by metacognitive strategy training. However, research on incorporating metacognitive guidance for collaborative writing is scarce. The current study explores the potential effectiveness of incorporating metacognitive prompts, that is, a form of metacognitive guidance, into…

The effective use of reporting verbs is an important part of establishing credibility in source-based writing. Although comparative studies of academic writing have shown that the reporting verbs used by novice and expert writers differ by discipline, fewer studies have examined whether such differences exist in English for academic purposes (EAP)…

This paper illustrates the role of metalanguage in an explicit literacy instruction to talk about the forms and functions of scientific genres, particularly the genre of explanation. In the context of science, metalanguage refers to the technical terms for talking "about" scientific language using words like law, hypothesis, and…

Background: Many first-year students find the reading of academic texts to be challenging and overwhelming. In particular, first-year students studying sociology at the South African institution where the study was conducted complain of comprehension challenges. This may be due to the presence of numerous theoretical and abstract concepts in…

The benefits of engaging students in mathematics classroom dialogue have been highlighted (and advocated) in a large body of research studies, most of which were conducted in Western cultural contexts. Whether such research advocacy can be extended legitimately to encompass practice in classrooms situated in other cultural contexts, such as East…

The use of collaborative writing partnerships is frequently cited as an effective strategy to increase the productivity and quality of academic writing (Austin & Baldwin, 1991). However, developing and utilizing these relationships effectively can prove challenging to early-career academics. This article used Boud, Keogh, and Walker's (1985)…

A persisting gap in the field of disciplinary literacy is lack of conceptual clarity around the term "discipline." In this theoretical article, the author explains some concerns with existing definitional imprecision and argues that genre-oriented activity theory offers a way to reconceptualize the focus of disciplinary literacy,…

Concept maps can be used in undergraduate biology as ways to visually communicate the relationships among things and events. One strength of concept mapping is that there is not just a single, correct way to compose one, given a list of particular concepts. Nevertheless there seem to be associations among ideas that are expressed frequently while…