In the international context of concerns about standards in writing, this article addresses the role of grammar in the teaching of writing. It considers both current and historical perspectives on the teaching of grammar and offers a critique of research which attempts to determine the impact of grammar teaching on writing, but which does not investigate how the grammar teaching was pedagogical...

This study compared English L2 writers’ (N = 111) performance on an integrated writing task from the Canadian Academic Language (CAEL) Assessment under three prewriting planning conditions: required self-timed fixed time planning, and suggested (i.e., optional) planning. The participants’ essays were scored according to CAEL bands by raters at Paragon Testing Inc. effect of condition participan...

Based on a corpus of 223 argumentative essays written by English as a foreign language learners, this study shows that spelling errors, whether detected manually or automatically, are a reliable predictor of the quality of L2 texts and that reliability is further improved by subcategorizing errors. However the benefit derived from subcategorization is much lower in the case of errors automatica...

Despite a multiliteracies turn to understanding L2 writing activities, most scholars in China have continued to adopt a cognitive perspective to study Chinese students’ English composing. In this article, we argue that Chinese students have always composed English writing in a multilingual and multimodal fashion. Then, drawing on recent discussions in literacy and composition studies, we propos...

the writing skill is often perceived as the most difficult language skill since it requires a higher level of productive language control than other skills (celce-murcia & olshtain, 2000). the present study introduced a discourse-based framework for the teaching of writing on the basis systemic functional linguistics (sfl). to this end, 60 students majoring in teaching english as a foreign ...

The increasingly widespread use of social software (e.g., Wikis, Google Docs) in second language (L2) settings has brought a renewed attention to collaborative writing. Although the current methodological approaches to examining collaborative writing are valuable to understand L2 students’ interactional patterns or perceived experiences, they can be insufficient to capture the quantity and qual...