This case study involved a detailed examination of learning transfer from an English-for-general-academic-purposes writing course to tasks that involve writing in other academic courses. Data were gathered over one academic year from 11 students enrolled in the writing course. These students participated in a series of interviews and provided…

Based on Robinson's (2001a,b, 2003) Cognition Hypothesis and Skehan's (1998) Limited Attentional Capacity Model, this study explored the effects of task complexity on the fluency and lexical complexity of 108 EFL students' argumentative writing. Task complexity was manipulated using three factors: (1) availability of planning time; (2) provision…

This article presents the findings of a study that investigated (1) the extent to which written corrective feedback (CF) can help advanced L2 learners, who already demonstrate a high level of accuracy in two functional uses of the English article system (the use of "a" for first mention and "the" for subsequent or anaphoric mentions), further…

Studies on academic biliteracy have had a tendency to focus on multilingual scholars' current status of academic biliteracy and not on their prior experiences in their home countries. However, these experiences are vital to understanding their current status of academic biliteracy because the multilingual scholars' distinctive experiences in…

There is very little research on lexical issues in writing center tutorials with second language writers, despite the impact that lexical strengths and needs have on the ability to make meaning with text. Further, we have come to realize that L2 writers come from many backgrounds and may have very different strengths and needs based on their prior…

Studies of cognitive processes in SL writing have paid attention to the strategies that writers use to tackle problems in composing. In text-generation, finding lexical items in the L2 to express their meanings is one of the most crucial problems writers have to face, for reasons related to the availability and accessibility of relevant linguistic…

Within a social view of literacy, this paper reports a two-year ethnographic case study of an adolescent multilingual writer, with respect to her transitions across in-school (i.e., Creative Writing class) and out-of-school writing contexts. This study was aimed to address two specific gaps in the fields of second language (L2) writing and…

Although models have been a mainstay of academic writing pedagogy for centuries, a recurrent critique has been that they control or limit student writing and misrepresent the affairs they claim to model. These insufficiencies notwithstanding, models are ubiquitous in the ordinary, practical world, and their usefulness to novices can easily go…

The formulaic styles of dissertation writing inherited from the sciences continue to influence dissertation writers in social sciences, and in particular TESOL and applied linguistics. Some scholars both within and outside the U.S. recommend that we expand the options for dissertation writers beyond these narrow conventions ([Eisner, 1997];…

About a decade ago it was suggested (Belcher, 1997) that increasing diversity among professional academics writing in English, i.e., the growing presence of women and those (both men and women) from outside the Anglophone "inner circle" (Kachru, 1992), was exerting mounting pressure on established academia for greater tolerance of non-traditional,…

This study examined writers' use of their first language (L1) while writing in their second language (L2). Twenty students each wrote four short argumentative essays in their L1 (Dutch) and four in their L2 (English) under think-aloud conditions. We analysed whether L1 use varied between writers and tasks, and whether it was related to general…

Although the role of social interaction through conversational activities is well established in the L2 writing classroom in relation to idea development, understanding rhetorical modes, the creation of a sense of audience, as well as the promotion of feedback, relatively little attention has been given to the actual discourse of teachers and…

In many mainland Chinese universities, undergraduate students specializing in English language and applied linguistics are required to write a dissertation, in English, of about 5000 words exploring some aspect of original research. This is a task which is of considerable difficulty not only at the genre or discourse level but also at the…

This paper presents a critical analysis of two recent studies on error correction, Ellis, Sheen, Murakami, and Takashima (2008) and Bitchener (2008) and argues that neither study constitutes evidence for error correction based on discussion of the comparability of participants, design issues, and analysis flaws in both studies. The paper further…

The purpose of this paper is to provide a detailed analysis of how lexical differences related to cohesion and connectionist models can distinguish first language (L1) writers of English from second language (L2) writers of English. Key to this analysis is the use of the computational tool Coh-Metrix, which measures cohesion and text difficulty at…