this writing may be of interest to those involved in content and language instruction in bilingual education, immersion, and esl programs, to those who believe that the mainstream elt has focused on how well learners learn and teachers teach, and almost overlooked the equally important question of how well learners learn to use it for learning. this writing is, more specifically, to be of inter...

1. introduction language teachers frequently observe a gap between their students' potential competence and their performance in the class. anderson (1993) attributes this to the fact that human has a limited processing capacity and is not able to attend to various aspects of a task simultaneously. this limitation causes l2 learners not to be able to focus on both meaning and form at the same t...

This study investigates the roles of cohesion and coherence in evaluations of essay quality. Cohesion generally has a facilitative effect on text comprehension and is assumed to be related to essay coherence. By contrast, recent studies of essay writing have demonstrated that computational indices of cohesion are not predictive of evaluations of writing quality. This study investigates expert r...

Although L2 writing has attracted salient attention and monopolized many studies in EFL contexts, there is still no full image of its complicated nature.  Trying to play a supplementary role in achieving that image, this study aimed at finding whether Persian and English argumentative and descriptive academic writings were inter/intra-lingually associated and if genre played a role in p...

Metacognitive knowledge is knowledge about learning. Recent research suggests that metacognitive knowledge plays an important function in cognitive activities concerning language use and acquisition. This paper aims to investigate the role of metacognitive knowledge in the English writing of Chinese EFL learners. The present study involves 120 non-English major freshmen in China as participants...

Gender differences were analyzed across countries of origin and continents, and across mother tongues and language families, using a large-scale database, containing information on 27,119 adult learners of Dutch as a second language. Female learners consistently outperformed male learners in speaking and writing proficiency in Dutch as a second language. This gender gap remained remarkably robu...

Although story mapping strategy has been shown to be beneficial in many reading comprehension classes, the benefits of this technique have not been thoroughly investigated in L2 writing research. The small number of previous studies (e.g., Li, 2007; Brunner, 2010) have found the potential benefits of using story mapping strategy on students’ writing performance, but they did not focus on differ...

The study reported herein assessed levels and patterns of concurrent correlations for Listening Comprehension (LC) and Reading Comprehension (RC) scores provided by the Secondary Level English Proficiency (SLEP) test with direct measures of ESL speaking proficiency (interview rating) and writing proficiency (essay rating), respectively, and (b) the internal consistency and dimensionality of the...

Mainland Chinese graduate students in North America generally exhibit a common pattern of English proficiency: academic writing performance greatly exceeds oral performance. Many linguistic, cultural, and educational factors contribute to different aspects of this phenomenon. In this essay, the causalities, along with the main points of understanding and assumptions are analyzed through a liter...