This study aims at investigating the effect of dynamic assessment (DA) on L2 writing achievement if applied via blogging as a Web 2.0 tool, as well as examining which pattern of interaction is more conducive to learning in such an environment. The results of the study indicate that using weblogs to provide mediation contributes to the enhancement of the overall writing performance, vocabulary a...

The advantages offered by natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning enable students to receive automated feedback on their argumentation skills, independent of educator, time, location. Although there is a growing amount literature formative feedback, empirical evidence the effects adaptive mechanisms novel NLP approaches enhance argumentative writing remains scarce. To help fill t...

The paradigm shift from testing the outcome to assessing the learning of process shines a light on the alternative assessment approaches, among which portfolio-assessment has sparked researchers’ interest in writing instruction. This study aimed at investigating the effect of portfolio-assessment on Iranian EFL students’ writing achievement through the process-centered approach to writi...

Recent versions of international high-stakes tests like TOEFL and IELTS have made use of integrated tasks in addition to the traditional independent tasks in a claim to provide a more realistic estimation of the test takers’ language abilities. The present study aimed to investigate how test takers’ performance may differ on such tasks. As such, the test takers’ performance was compared on IELT...

Academic writing is not just about presenting a set of ideas, but through the act of writing, the authors position themselves as individuals having particular identities which mostly reflect the dominant sociocultural values and practices of the discourse communities in which they are living and performing. The present study, using a mixed method approach, attempted to explore the evidences of ...

Researchers are beginning to explore how to generate summaries of extended argumentative conversations in social media, such as those found in reader comments in on-line news. To date, however, there has been little discussion of what these summaries should be like and a lack of humanauthored exemplars, quite likely because writing summaries of this kind of interchange is so difficult. In this ...

We introduce a novel task Anecdote Recognition and Recommendation. An anecdote is a story with a point revealing account of an individual person. Recommending proper anecdotes can be used as evidence to support argumentative writing or as a clue for further reading. We represent an anecdote as a structured tuple — < person, story, implication >. Anecdote recognition runs on archived argumentati...

This study aims to examine a design of computer-supported collaborative learning environment featured by Knowledge Forum with embedded teacher-student codesigned scaffolds and group portfolios as an assessment tool for Chinese tertiary business students and to further investigate how academic literacy develops in the designed environment. Four intact classes with 127 Year 1 students participate...