Purpose: This article describes the process of redesigning the American Cultural Studies 499 course in order to integrate information literacy and critical thinking outcomes into specific assignments. Since this research and writing proficiency course at Western Washington University has traditionally been taught by a librarian with background in the discipline, the article also considers the c...

This corpus-based study compares the use of the alternating ditransitive verb TELL by native speakers and Chinese learners of English. The corpora used are the written sub-corpus of ICE-GB (the British component of International Corpus of English) and CLEC (the Chinese Learner English Corpus). CLEC consists of both lowand high-proficiency L2 learners’ writing. By incorporating corpus contrastiv...

Background Limited studies have been conducted on delineating the rationale behind individual differences in children developing metacognitive knowledge, as well reading and writing proficiency. Aims This study examined dynamics of children’s development knowledge proficiency during their progression from Grade 1 to 6. Sample(s) A total 420 students participated study, who were tested 6 times a...

This study investigates research writing anxiety and self-efficacy beliefs among English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) graduate students in engineering-related fields. The relationship between the two writing affective constructs was examined and students’ perspectives on research writing anxiety were also explored. A total of 218 survey responses from engineering graduate students at Taiwanese u...

the purpose of the present study was to explore the effectiveness of raising iranian learners’ pragmatic awareness of intercultural rhetoric in enhancing their l2 writing ability, as well as their written complexity and accuracy. to this end, two 25-member groups of efl learners who were taking basic writing course at islamic azad university, roudehen branch, were selected based on their perfor...

This study explores the construct of lexical sophistication and its applications for measuring second language lexical and speaking proficiency. In doing so, the study introduces the Tool for the Automatic Analysis of LExical Sophistication (TAALES), which calculates text scores for 135 classic and newly developed lexical indices related to word frequency, range, bigram and trigram frequency, a...

this study investigated 1) whether the effect of teacher-developed graphic organizers vis-à-vis student-developed ones was more significant on improving intermediate efl learners’ writing, and 2)whether the use of both graphic organizers had any impact on their writing. the participants were selectedin two stages: 130 students sat for a piloted proficiency test. those who scored above half ofth...