The potentials of mobile learning in teaching academic writing skills for ESL students are explored in this paper. Although there have been studies on MALL to improve writing skills, academic writing was never really touched. Few aspects are covered like the changes in educational technology, defining MALL, identifying issues in academic writing by ESL students, approaches used in academic writ...

This study investigates a novel approach to automatically assessing essay quality that combines natural language processing approaches that assess text features with approaches that assess individual differences in writers such as demographic information, standardized test scores, and survey results. The results demonstrate that combining text features and individual differences increases the a...

this study aims to examine the strategies utilized by eleven postgraduate students in an efl university context in their attempts to acquire the textual practices of their discipline. first- and second-year ma students, one ph.d. student as well as individuals who had completed their ma programs in tefl took part in interviews in order to elicit the strategies they used when they endeavored to ...

The consideration of rater training is very important in construct validation of a writing test because it is through training that raters are adapted to the use of students’ writing ability instead of their own criteria for assessing compositions (Charney, 1984). However, although training has been discussed in the literature of writing assessment, there is little research regarding raters’ pe...

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...

Skills in reading, writing, and mathematics are key to academic learning but are conventionally taught separately from the discipline areas to which they must be applied. For example, students may be taught writing skills in the morning in an English course and then be expected to apply them to writing an essay in a history class in the afternoon. Several problems arise with this structure. Fir...