There is growing evidence that the lack of competence of university ESL (English as a second language) students in academic writing affects their overall academic performance. Olivas and Li (2006) connected low second-language proficiency levels in English to poor academic performance of international students studying at both university and college levels in the United States. Although, many E...

recent versions of international high-stakes tests like toefl and ielts have made use of integrated tasks in addition to the traditional independent tasks in a claim to provide a more realistic estimation of the test takers’ language abilities. the present study aimed to investigate how test takers’ performance may differ on such tasks. as such, the test takers’ performance was compared on ielt...

This study purported to comparatively investigate the influence of collaborative writing on the quality of individual writing of four female Iranian and four female Malaysian students. The first semester students at a private university in Malaysia, who were comparable in terms of age, gender, study discipline, and language proficiency, were divided into two Iranian and two Malaysian dyads. The...

In recent years, a number of large-scale writing assessments (e.g., TOEFL iBT) have employed integrated writing tests to measure test takers’ academic writing ability. Using a quantitative method, the current study examined how written textual features and use of source material(s) varied across two types of text-based integrated writing tasks (i.e., listening-to-write vs. reading-to-write) and...

The ability to write effectively is becoming progressively important and instruction in writing is assuming an increasing role in second and foreign language education. Students’ writing abilities have been tested through various writing tasks. Independent tasks of writing or writing-only tasks have been utilized to test students’ writing ability; however, they have been criticized for their la...

this study investigated the impact of using the technique of self-monitoring on non-academic efl learners’ composition writing. fifty female students studying english at navid english institute in shiraz, iran were chosen based on the results of a proficiency test. they were all 16-20 years old and were intermediate learners of english who were divided into two control and experimental groups a...