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...

Academic writing is not just about presenting a set of ideas, but through the act of writing, the authors position themselves as individuals having particular identities which mostly reflect the dominant sociocultural values and practices of the discourse communities in which they are living and performing. The present study, using a mixed method approach, attempted to explore the evidences of ...

Researchers are beginning to explore how to generate summaries of extended argumentative conversations in social media, such as those found in reader comments in on-line news. To date, however, there has been little discussion of what these summaries should be like and a lack of humanauthored exemplars, quite likely because writing summaries of this kind of interchange is so difficult. In this ...

We introduce a novel task Anecdote Recognition and Recommendation. An anecdote is a story with a point revealing account of an individual person. Recommending proper anecdotes can be used as evidence to support argumentative writing or as a clue for further reading. We represent an anecdote as a structured tuple — < person, story, implication >. Anecdote recognition runs on archived argumentati...

This study aims to examine a design of computer-supported collaborative learning environment featured by Knowledge Forum with embedded teacher-student codesigned scaffolds and group portfolios as an assessment tool for Chinese tertiary business students and to further investigate how academic literacy develops in the designed environment. Four intact classes with 127 Year 1 students participate...

The present study aims to investigate the use of demonstratives in argumentative writing by Chinese EFL learners. A corpus-based study was conducted. In this study, demonstratives this, that, these, those, as well as it were tagged and analyzed. By the quantitative and qualitative analysis, the study shows the general features and typical errors of learners in using demonstratives. Some pedagog...

In this experimental study, 151 middle school students explored 3 historical controversies, first reading and discussing primary source documents in groups, then writing arguments on their own. Students were either randomly assigned to an experimental condition, using argumentative schemes and critical questions as guides during discussions, or to a comparison condition in which a traditional s...

The purpose of this study is to develop an integrated education model debate-argumentative writing and specifically suggest the teaching learning method in model. For this, I proposed a circulative debating argumentative including processes topic formation, outline creation, debating, writing, feedback, online term paper evaluation. One main characteristics that two activities circulate repetit...

Considerable literature explores the contribution of genre teaching in English academic writing. The role of this approach in developing academic writing of Iranian EFL students, however, has been underresearched. This study investigated the implications of using this approach with a class of undergraduate students in Iran. The current study reports on the findings of a project which employed a...

Change representation concerns how changes of text are presented in writing tools. Change representation in collaborative writing can play an important role for the collaborators' understanding of changes of text. We have conducted a laboratory study where 10 pairs of a writer and a reviewer produced argumentative letters by using the change representation functions. We have also set different ...