Background: English language writing is important in university entrance examinations in Japan and influences what learners and teachers do in English classes. This is especially noticeable in secondary education in Japan. While much research on university entrance examinations in Japan has been conducted, little attention has been paid to the types of writing required in these examinations. Me...

The study aimed to investigate students’ self-efficacy, self-esteem, and attitude as determinants of their writing performance. The participants for the study were 373 South Gonder Zone Preparatory School students who were chosen using multistage sampling technique. Questionnaire and writing test were employed to gather data. Pearson’s Correlation technique was used to analyze the associations ...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the impact of three writing tasks on the cognitive, affective and interpersonal factors typically associated with eating disorder symptoms, in a student population. METHOD Two experimental tasks and one control task were evaluated. Participants gave subjective ratings of the writing experience, and objective questionnaire measures were administered at baseline, and 4- an...

Integrated writing is increasingly used in language assessment programmes. As a hybrid task, it requires students to coordinate different skills, i.e. listening, reading and writing, retrieve information from multiple sources, compose an essay for specific purpose. Tapping into the varied skills that contribute successful integrated especially beneficial low proficiency students. However, mecha...

In a secondary school mathematics teaching methods course, a research team engaged 22 preservice secondary teachers (PSTs) in designing and posing tasks to algebra students through weekly letter writing. The goal of the tasks was for PSTs to elicit responses that would indicate student engagement in the mathematical processes described by NCTM (2000) and Bloom’s taxonomy (Bloom, Englehart, Furs...

Despite the increased use of integrated tasks in high-stakes academic writing assessment, research on rating criteria which reflect unique construct summary skills is comparatively rare. Using a mixed-method approach expert judgement, text analysis, and statistical this study examines features that discriminate summaries produced by 150 candidates at five levels proficiency reading-writing (R-W...

In this paper we describe the NPen++ system for wri ter independent on-line handwriting recognition. This recognizer needs no training for a particular wr i te r and can recognize any common writing style (cursive, hand-printed, or a mixture of both). The neural network architecture, which was originally proposed for continuous speech recognition tasks, and the preprocessing techniques of NPen+...

Abstract In Iran, most English teachers’ method of teaching writing is merely to have students do some writing exercises or simply to give them writing tests without any instruction, but writing is not an easy task for students, and teachers should be able to do more to facilitate their students’ writing. One of the ways to aid writing is dynamic assessment via graduated prompt. The graduated p...