This study used wrap-up effects on eye movements to assess the relationship between online reading behavior and comprehension. Participants, assessed on measures of reading, vocabulary, and spelling, read short passages that manipulated whether a syntactic boundary was "unmarked" by punctuation, "weakly marked" by a comma, or…

This paper aimed at investigating humor in text-based computer mediated communication (CMC). To this end, 200 turns exchanged by a number of 50 English language teachers on Viber, a messaging application, were randomly selected and analyzed based on Adam's (2012) classification of humor to examine emoticons, punctuations (question mark,…

The amount of available digital data is increasing at a tremendous rate. These data, however, are of limited use unless converted into a user-friendly form. We took on this task and built a natural language generation (NLG) driven system that generates journalistic news stories about elections without human intervention. In this paper, after…

This article studies students' use of sentence variety in an ESL writing course. The study includes three sentence features: (a) sentence types, (b) sentence combining, and (c) sentence patterns. Although sentence variety is part of the curriculum, the actual use of sentence structures has not been measured so far. By understanding students' use…

The English language plays a significant role in Saudi Arabia at the local and international levels. Spelling errors, as one of the challenging elements in writing confronted by Saudi learners of English, have a negative effect on the quality of their written translation products (Ababneh, 2019). Therefore, more analytical studies are needed to…

The ability to spell correctly is a fundamental skill for participating in society and engaging in professional work. In the German language, the capitalization of nouns and proper names presents major difficulties for both native and nonnative learners, since the definition of what is a noun varies according to one's linguistic perspective. In…

Tom Nicholson and Sue Dymock analysed research on teaching writing to identify the skills students need to write for impact. Their approach is based on a simple view of writing: it is ideas presented well. The two volumes of this book work together to explain and show teachers how to teach students these essential writing skills. Nicholson and…

This study examined multiple measures of written expression as predictors of narrative writing performance for 362 students in grades 4 through 6. Each student wrote a fictional narrative in response to a title prompt that was evaluated using a levels of language framework targeting productivity, accuracy, and complexity at the word, sentence, and…

Respeaking is an effective way to make live and pre-recorded television, as well as live events, accessible to a wide audience. Respeakers use speech-recognition software to repeat or paraphrase what is heard through a microphone in a robotic voice while enunciating punctuation and adding colours or labels to identify the speakers. Until now, most…

This study investigates the influence of a grammatical reconstruction task on talk and subsequent individual writing. In a South Korean university, two classes alternated learning conditions, between 'read-summarize-write' and 'read-reconstruct-write'. In the summarize condition, small groups collaborated to create a summary of the reading; in the…

In this article I mount an attack on the problematic conceptions of literacy that lie behind the Standards and Testing Agency's 2015 "Interim Teacher Assessment Frameworks at the End of Key Stage 2" and the "Key Stage 2 English Grammar, Punctuation and Spelling Tests." I employ an object of comparison (a philosophical method),…

The purpose of the current study is to elicit the opinions of Turkish primary school students and teachers about summary writing. The study group of the current research was selected by means of the criterion sampling method. The study group is comprised of 85 primary school fifth grade students and 17 classroom teachers teaching these students.…

Emoticons play a key role in digital written interactions. Since the 1980s research has highlighted their growing relevance, as they allow to convey increasingly rich emotional, social, and pragmatic information. This article contributes to this area of research by providing an analysis of emoticons as structural markers in Twitter interactions.…

This study was conducted to explore and analyze the most common essay writing errors among Saudi female learners at the departments of English, Majmaa'h University, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Therefore, the aim has been to identify those difficulties from an error analysis standpoint and identify the sources underlying them. An analysis of a written…

A concern about grammar and usage instruction is the ineffectiveness of the frequently-used practice of worksheets and out-of-context application. In light of recent findings that applied grammar instruction can improve students' writing, a need for research on increasing teachers' pedagogical knowledge in this area is indicated. This case study…