This paper presents a case study of a web-based on-line collaborative academic writing project by students of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) at two Higher Education institutions in the UK. The project aimed to develop the students’ academic writing in English by exploiting the informational and geographical gaps between them. The study outlines the logistical requirements of such a project...

Writing applications are currently designed for desktop personal computers. Mobile devices like PDAs or smart phones are increasingly being used for mobile applications such as access to information sources or local work on the device, but they are seldom used for collaborative tasks. Here we present AULA and AWLA, two applications that put mobile devices and collaborative educational environme...

As technology increasingly takes center stage of our lives, there are compelling reasons for incorporating technologies into the classroom. The prevailing of CALL (Computer Assisted Language Learning) has greatly changed the traditional teaching mode and added new contents into the existing teaching materials. As a significant skill for EFL (English as a Foreign Language) learners, there are ab...

The current study is an attempt to investigate the impact of explicit instruction of metadiscourse markers on advanced, intermediate, and elementary EFL learners’ writing performance. The participants of the study were 94 undergraduate students majoring in English Literature at the University of Isfahan. To elicit the relevant data, participants were given a pretest of writing ability to check ...

Recently, there is a need for fostering the critical reflective side of L2 teacher education. This study investigated the implications of personal narrative (PN) and reflective journal (RJ) writing for Iranian EFL teachers’ reflective writing. Sixty (36 women and 24 men) in-service secondary school EFL teachers were selected based on the convenience sampling from Iran. L2 teachers equally divid...

The purpose of this study is to find a practical solution for improving writing skill among Iranian high school learners of EFL. The main question was whether pragmatics had any priority over traditional methods in improving writing or not.  Forty high school students were selected on the basis of their performance in PET (2009). In addition the following instruments were also used in this quas...

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...

the purpose of this research was to analyze efl writing tasks in the most popular esol (english for speakers of other languages) exam preparation courses in iran: ielts, toefl, fce and cae. having collected the criteria of writing task appropriateness in light of the process-oriented approach to writing instruction, 114 learner participants were asked to rate efl writing tasks based on a checkl...

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...

The purpose of this research was to analyze EFL writing tasks in two of the most popular English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) exam preparation courses in Iran, namely IELTS and TOEFL. Having collected the criteria of writing task appropriateness in light of the process-oriented approach to writing instruction, we asked 60 learner participants to rate EFL writing tasks in 3 IELTS and 3...