This study examined the construct validity of the e-rater automated essay scoring engine as an alternative to human scoring in the context of TOEFL essay writing. Analyses were based on a sample of students who repeated the TOEFL within a short time period. Two e-rater scores were investigated in this study, the first based on optimally predicting the human essay score and the second based on e...

Academic writing is a critical skill distinct from creative writing. While brevity is vital, clarity in writing reflects clarity of thought. This paper is a primer for novice academic writers.

Almost little is known about creative writing. In this research, creative writing has been introduced as an alternative to academic writing. The aims were to introduce creative writing as an alternative to academic writing to boost the participants’ attitude towards writing in general. The participants were 32 senior university students studying English Translation at Islamic Azad University, T...

Essay questions designed to measure writing ability, along with open-ended questions requiring short answers, are highly-valued components of effective assessment programs, but the expense and logistics of scoring them reliably often present a barrier to their use. Extensive research and development efforts at Educational Testing Service (ETS) over the past several years (see http://www.ets.org...

Educators are interested in essay evaluation systems that include feedback about writing features that can facilitate the essay revision process. For instance, if the thesis statement of a student’s essay could be automatically identified, the student could then use this information to reflect on the thesis statement with regard to its quality, and its relationship to other discourse elements i...

Extant research has highlighted the essentiality of grammatical metaphor (GM) as a linguistic resource in academic writing. Drawing on Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), this study investigated relationship between explicit instruction nominalisation one type GM and ESL learners’ mastery key resource. Adopting true experimental design, involved 38 Filipino professionals Singapore who needed...

As a writing teacher, i find teaching most challenging. To begin with, skills are not meant to be taught, and students cannot just “know how write” after they had attended lessons on skills. Writing is process. Learners may master one process easier than others. Academic fear many undergraduates face when enter higher institution. make matters worse, learners “acquire” their for in high schools...

A body of research has recently emerged in the UK which adopts an ‘academic literacies’ stance towards student writing. An ‘academic literacies’ stance conceptualises student writing as a socially situated discourse practice which is ideologically inscribed (Jones et al., 1999; Lea & Street, 1998). Whilst powerful as an oppositional frame, that is as a critique of current conceptualisations and...

This article discusses the academic writing challenges of undergraduate students at Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT), South Africa. It examines challenges such as lack of a mastery of academic writing conventions, analysis of writing topics, using writing to construct social identities; ability to research and apply knowledge across different context and poor sentence skills. It a...