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…

In the research conducted by Truscott and Hsu (2008), the authors demonstrate that although rewriting corrected drafts results in lower grammar error rates on the rewritten texts, this effect does not carry over to a subsequent new writing task. The authors conclude that the result indicates that there may have been no language improvement from…

This paper presents a detailed examination of learning transfer from a university English as a second language (ESL) writing course to a writing task with characteristics very different from the kind of writing done in this ESL writing course but typical of the kind of writing required in other academic courses (i.e., involving text-responsible…

Lexical phrases are both numerous and functionally important in written texts. Despite this, L2 learners often find their use problematic, typically overusing a limited number of well-known phrases, while at the same time lacking a diverse enough phrasal repertoire to employ lexical phrases in a native-like manner. While a number of studies have…

The number of international ESL students completing their degree programs in Australia has risen dramatically in the past decade. One factor that may be motivating students to undertake tertiary studies in Australia is the expectation that this form of immersion will lead to improved English language skills. However, existing research, such as…

Within a global trend of the anglicization of academic publishing, in the humanities and social sciences (HSS) publication in indigenous languages, nevertheless, in many contexts, continues to thrive. Given that the overall anglicization of academic publishing tends to be negotiated at the local level, this study seeks to discover how a…

This qualitative study investigates the invented spellings of young EFL writers in terms of the relationship between phonological awareness and internalized grapheme-phoneme principles. Two kindergarteners and two first graders participated in weekly English writing tasks for 14 months. Results obtained from protocols of the students' free writing…

Although plagiarism is considered among western academic circles as one of the worst "crimes" a student can commit, many scholars suggest that these attitudes do not apply to students from areas outside this sphere. They believe that in many countries, plagiarism is considered culturally acceptable. As such, ESL or EFL instructors in charge of…

Although peer review has been shown to be beneficial in many writing classrooms, the benefits of peer review to the reviewer, or the student giving feedback, has not been thoroughly investigated in second-language writing research. The purpose of this study is to determine which is more beneficial to improving student writing: giving or receiving…

This article presents key findings from an interview-based study of the beliefs, practices, and experiences of 16 proofreaders of student writing in a university setting. "Proofreading" is defined for the purposes of this research as "third-party interventions (entailing written alteration) on assessed work in progress." We report results relating…

This study investigated the impact of aspects of the lexical proficiency of EFL students on their summary writing in English (L2) by controlling for the impact of a range of linguistic abilities in English and Japanese (L1). Sixty-eight Japanese undergraduate students wrote two summaries of English texts in English. Their English lexical…

The extent to which ESL learners benefit from written corrective feedback has been debated at length since Truscott (1996) mounted a case for its abolition. Ten years later, the debate continues, not only because little attention has been given to testing its efficacy over time but also because studies that have investigated the issue have not…

Studies of Anglo-American writing pedagogies in EFL contexts have largely focused on local teachers' agency and innovativeness, but have neglected students' active role in localizing these pedagogical imports. Employing a teacher-research method, I examine my students' negotiations with a sequenced writing approach [Leki, I. (1992)] that I used in…

Much of L2 teacher feedback research is conducted with advanced students in process-oriented classrooms in the United States. There is less published research about how school teachers in EFL contexts respond to student writing. Specifically little is known about why teachers respond to writing in the ways they do, and if discrepancies exist…

This paper reports on a study on the relationship between cognitive task complexity and linguistic performance in L2 writing. In the study, two models proposed to explain the influence of cognitive task complexity on linguistic performance in L2 are tested and compared: Skehan and Foster's Limited Attentional Capacity Model (Skehan, 1998; Skehan &…