The pressure to produce work in English and to publish internationally has increased over recent years. However, a large number of non-native writers may be excluded from the web of global scholarship due to defective rhetorical organizations and discourse structures of their works. This study aimed to investigate frequency and distribution of transition markers (TMs) in introduction sections o...

This article considers the problem of correcting errors made by English as a Second Language writers from a machine learning perspective, and addresses an important issue of developing an appropriate training paradigm for the task, one that accounts for error patterns of non-native writers using minimal supervision. Existing training approaches present a trade-off between large amounts of cheap...

The power of media lies in its persuasive function, which gives media a potential to maneuver on the mind of audience (van Dijk 1996). This potential is realized via different linguistic resources, one important group of which is metadiscoursal resources. The major aim of this study was to explore how and in what distribution these resources are employed by writers with different cultural backg...

We propose a method for modeling pronunciation variation in the context of spell checking for non-native writers of English. Spell checkers, typically developed for native speakers, fail to address many of the types of spelling errors peculiar to non-native speakers, especially those errors influenced by differences in phonology. Our model of pronunciation variation is used to extend a pronounc...

In this paper we present a new spell-checking system that utilizes contextual information for automatic correction of non-word misspellings. The system is evaluated with a large corpus of essays written by native and nonnative speakers of English to the writing prompts of high-stakes standardized tests (TOEFL and GRE). We also present comparative evaluations with Aspell and the speller from Mic...

Recent research has shown that academic writing is not ‘author-evacuated’ but, rather, carries a representation of the writers’ identity. One way through which writers project their identity in academic writing is stance-taking toward propositions advanced in the text. Appropriate stance-taking has proved to be challenging for novice writers of Research Articles (RAs), especially those writing ...

the power of media lies in its persuasive function, which gives media a potential to maneuver on the mind of audience (van dijk 1996). this potential is realized via different linguistic resources, one important group of which is metadiscoursal resources. the major aim of this study was to explore how and in what distribution these resources are employed by writers with different cultural backg...