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...

For teacher educators, genre-based pedagogies offer a valuable resource for assisting both preand inservice writing instructors to assist their students to produce effective and relevant texts. Instead of focusing on the process of composition, the content of texts, or the abstract prescriptions of disembodied grammars, genre pedagogies enable teachers to ground their courses in the texts that ...

This paper provides descriptive data that reflect the locations where L1-L2 translation and L2-L1 translation occur. Seven English majors, juniors, were instructed and trained to produce their written texts in English and to “think aloud” at the same time. The thinking-aloud protocol was transcribed and analyzed and categorized into different sets. This paper only focuses on the part of L1-L2 a...

Using the World Wide Web (hereinafter the ‘Web’) has become an increasingly viable way to source information in academic writing. However, the Web is a fundamentally different type of resource from conventional sources such as books and journals. This paper argues that there is a need among learners for a heightened critical awareness of web-source nuances. Specifically, although the Web contai...

The paper argues that grammar correction in L2 writing classes should be abandoned, for the following reasons: (a) Substantial research shows it to be ineffective and none shows it to be helpful in any interesting sense; (b) for both theoretical and practical reasons, one can expect it to be ineffective; and (c) it has harmful effects. I also consider and reject a number of arguments previously...

This study analyzes the types and frequencies of hedges and intensifiers employed in NS and NNS academic essays included in a corpus of L1 and L2 student academic texts (745 essays/220,747 words). The overarching goal of this investigation is to focus on these lexical and syntactic features of written discourse because they effectively lend themselves to instruction in L2 academic writing cours...

This paper presents a word-for-word translation approach using Wiktionary for SemEval-2014 Task 5. The language pairs attempted for this task were EnglishSpanish and English-German. Since this approach did not take context into account, it performed poorly.

This mixed-method study examines the effectiveness of teaching Google search techniques (GSTs) to Korean EFL college students in an intermediate-level academic English writing course. 18 students participated in a 4-day GST workshop consisting of an overview session of the web as corpus and Google as a concordancer, and three training sessions targeting the use of quotation marks (“”) and a wil...

The purpose of this paper is to provide a detailed analysis of how lexical differences related to cohesion and connectionist models can distinguish first language (L1) writers of English from second language (L2) writers of English. Key to this analysis is the use of the computational tool Coh-Metrix, which measures cohesion and text difficulty at various levels of language, discourse, and conc...

This study of digital storytelling attempts to apply Kress's (2003) notions of synaesthesia, transformation, and transduction to the analysis of four undergraduate L2 writers' multimedia text creation processes. The students, entering freshmen, participated in an experimental course entitled "Multimedia Writing," whose purpose was to experience and explore the processes of multimodal textual co...