English as Foreign Language (EFL) students face additional difficulties for academic writing largely due to their level of language competency. An appropriate structural process of writing can help students develop their academic writing skills. This study explored the use of the e-readers to facilitate EFL students' process-based academic writing. The experiment was conducted in the graduate l...

As most traditional classroom environments in English as Foreign Language (EFL) still restrict learners’ collaboration and interaction in college writing classes, today, the majority of EFL learners are accessing Social Networking Sites (SNSs) as online communities of practice (CoPs) for adopting informal collaborative learning as a way of practicing English beyond the classroom. This study aim...

This study explores 19 Taiwanese students’ writing in weekly online forum posts and traditional essays. Results drawn from discourse analysis of students’ writing in both types of writing tasks showed that the semesterlong online writing accompanied by explicit instruction on essays and basic academic writing conventions appeared to help raise EFL students’ consciousness of register in the two ...

This paper aims to apply metacognitive theory in EFL writing instruction to provide an alternative solution to the difficulties and problems in EFL writing classes in China. Metacognition is knowledge about cognition and regulation of cognition. This paper advocates both teaching with metacognition and teaching for metacognition. To teach with metacognition, an EFL writing instructor should ref...

English language practitioners have long relied on intuition-based scales for rating EFL/ESL writing. As these scales lack an empirical basis, the scores they generate tend to be unreliable, which results in invalid interpretations. Given the significance of the genre of description and the fact that the relevant literature does not introduce any data-based analytic scales for rating EFL descri...

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...

Metacognitive knowledge is knowledge about learning. Recent research suggests that metacognitive knowledge plays an important function in cognitive activities concerning language use and acquisition. This paper aims to investigate the role of metacognitive knowledge in the English writing of Chinese EFL learners. The present study involves 120 non-English major freshmen in China as participants...

Writing in English might be one of the most difficult tasks for EFL (English as a Foreign Language) learners. This paper presents FLOW, a writing assistance system. It is built based on first-language-oriented input function and context sensitive approach, aiming at providing immediate and appropriate suggestions including translations, paraphrases, and n-grams during composing and revising pro...

This paper, as part of an ongoing study, reports a qualitative case study in investigating pre-writing activities among three English as Foreign language (EFL) learners in an online community via a facebook group. The data were collected from the learners’ interactional exchanges, observation notes of their interaction and responses to online written interview questions. Based on a qualitative ...