Bilingual dictionary use in L2 writing test performance has recently been the subject of debate. Opinions differ according to how the trait is understood and whether the system favors the process-oriented or product-oriented views towards the assessment and writing skill. Given the need for more empirical support, this study is aimed at investigating the availability of bilingual dictionary use...

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 ...

BACKGROUND Over the past years, the number of available informatics resources in medicine has grown exponentially. While specific inventories of such resources have already begun to be developed for Bioinformatics (BI), comparable inventories are as yet not available for the Medical Informatics (MI) field, so that locating and accessing them currently remains a difficult and time-consuming task...

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...

This paper examines the relationship between part-of-speech frequencies and text typology in the British National Corpus Sampler. Four pairwise comparisons of part-of-speech frequencies were made: written language vs. spoken language; informative writing vs. imaginative writing; conversational speech vs. ‘task-oriented’ speech; and imaginative writing vs. ‘task-oriented’ speech. The following v...

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...

Task based design is considered one of the effective ways of designing functional software. It is generally accepted that tasks play an important role in system and user interface design. Identifying the user's tasks enables the designer to construct user interfaces reflecting the tasks' properties, including efficient usage patterns, easy-touse interaction sequences, and powerful assistance fe...

We propose a quantitative operationalisation of the complexity of a writing system. This complexity, also referred to as orthographic depth, plays a crucial role in psycholinguistic modelling of reading aloud (and learning to read aloud) in several languages. The complexity of a writing system is expressed by two measures, viz. that of the complexity of letter{phoneme alignment and that of the ...

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 ...