Evidence is accumulating that the level of text comprehension is dependent on the situatedness and sensory richness of a child's mental representation formed during reading. This study investigated whether these factors involved in text comprehension also serve a functional role in writing a narrative. Direct influences of situatedness and sensory richness as well as indirect influences via the...

The purpose of this research was to analyze EFL writing tasks in two of the most popular English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) exam preparation courses in Iran, namely IELTS and TOEFL. Having collected the criteria of writing task appropriateness in light of the process-oriented approach to writing instruction, we asked 60 learner participants to rate EFL writing tasks in 3 IELTS and 3...

Three groups of children of different ages who were considered by their teachers as showing symptoms of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and matched controls were tested in a series of expressive writing tasks, derived from a standardized writing test. In the first study, 24 sixth- and seventh-grade children with ADHD symptoms wrote a description of an image. The ADHD group's exp...

This work investigates whether the development of ideas in writing can be captured by graph properties derived from the text. Focusing on student essays, we represent the essay as a graph, and encode a variety of graph properties including PageRank as features for modeling essay scores related to quality of development. We demonstrate that our approach improves on a stateof-the-art system on th...

Following previous studies reporting a beneficial effect for pre-task planning on learners' task performance, the present research takes into account the possible effects of directing learners' attention to meaning and form of language on their written production while they have one- and five-minute strategic planning time. The study randomly categorized 48 intermediate learners of English into...