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 ...

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...

Hyunsook Yoon Dongguk University, Korea This paper reports on a qualitative study that investigated the changes in students’ writing process associated with corpus use over an extended period of time. The primary purpose of this study was to examine how corpus technology affects students’ development of competence as second language (L2) writers. The research was mainly based on case studies wi...

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...

This quasi-experimental study set out to examine the effect of peer corrective feedback on feedback givers and receivers in L2 writing. The forms in focus were a/an, the, and the past tense.The study was conducted in an EFL classroom setting with 45 learners of English in three writing classes which served as the feedback givers, receivers, and the control group.  Over four sessions of treatmen...

This article investigates the potential benefits of using children’s literature in adult second language (L2) classrooms. A short-term, intensive university course for English reading and writing was designed incorporating children’s literature into the curriculum. The author describes the course and discusses how children’s literature can be used to improve students’ linguistic, cognitive, and...