the difficulty of assessing the writing skill is well known. different testing facets seem to affect the result of assessing the writing skill. in addition to the writer’s ability, the topic of the writing task, and methods of rating may contribute to the writer’s score. in this study, 50 efl learners wrote four different types of writing tasks (convincing, describing, instructing, and explaini...

the purpose of the study was to activate the passive lexical knowledge through noticing and to investigate the effect of sentence writing as the post task of noticing activity on strengthening the effect of noticing. forty-two iranian female adult upper-intermediate english students of a state university in 2 homogenous groups participated in noticing the lexical items whose production were not...

The Common Core State Standards emphasize students writing analytically in response to texts. Questions remain about the nature of instruction that develops students’ textbased writing skills. In the present study, we examined the role that writing task quality plays in students’ mastery of analytic textbased writing. Textbased writing tasks (N = 149) were collected from 27 fifthgrade teachers ...

This study aimed to investigate the impact of task sequencing, along +/- reasoning demands dimension, on writing task performance in terms of accuracy.  The study was motivated by Robinson’s Cognition Hypothesis (CH) as well as previous studies investigating the relationships between task complexity and second language production. The participants of the study were 90 intermediate students at t...

Designing appropriate materials and activities to enhance vocabulary learning is one of the primary goals of language courses. Among the claims about efficient pedagogical tasks is the Involvement Load Hypothesis (Laufer & Hulstijn, 2001) according to which vocabulary development is contingent on the amount of cognitive process a task involves. Building on the previous research on this hypothes...

The present study investigated the factor structure of a field trial sample of the Test of English as a Foreign LanguageTM Internet-based test (TOEFL iBT). An item-level confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was conducted for a polychoric correlation matrix of items on a test form completed by 2,720 participants in the 2003–2004 TOEFL iBT Field Study. CFA-based multitrait-multimethod (MTMM) analys...

This study explored the nature of transfer among bilingual vs. trilinguals with varying levels of competence in English and their previous languages. The hypotheses were tested in writing tasks designed for 75 high (N= 35) vs. intermediate (N=40) proficient EFL learners with Turkish, Persian, English and Persian, English linguistic backgrounds. Qualitative data were also collected through some ...