This Essay considers the substantive and institutional aspects of an economic theory of contract regulation. It lists the various functions that analysts have assigned to contract regulation and briefly discusses the substantive wisdom and institutional feasibility of performing those functions. The essay tentatively concludes that the state should enforce contracts, supply vocabularies that ar...

The automated scoring of second-language (L2) learner text along various writing dimensions is an increasingly active research area. In this paper, we focus on determining the topical relevance of an essay to the prompt that elicited it. Given the burden involved in manually assigning scores for use in training supervised prompt-relevance models, we develop unsupervised models and show that the...

Directions: Imagine that you are teaching a class in academic writing for first-year college students. In your class, drafts are not graded. Instead, you give students feedback and allow them to revise their essays before submitting them for grades. In response to your first essay assignment (given below), you have received the following draft from Madeleine X., one of your students. Write a br...

The Intelligent Essay Assessor is commercial software that grades essays as accurately as skilled human graders. It was used to critique senior officers’ papers in both the Army’s and Air Force’s Command and General Staff Colleges. The Army Research Institute has supported development of this software, which understands the meaning of written essays. Automatic essay scoring is well-suited to di...

This work investigates whether the development of ideas in writing can be captured by graph properties derived from the text. Focusing on student essays, we represent the essay as a graph, and encode a variety of graph properties including PageRank as features for modeling essay scores related to quality of development. We demonstrate that our approach improves on a stateof-the-art system on th...

The present study was aimed at analysing cognitive deficits of dyslexic adults, and examining their written language skills in comparison with their peers. Our results confirm the presence of a certain profile of symptoms in adult dyslexics. We noticed deficits in: phonological (verbal) short-term memory, phonological awareness, rapid automatised naming (speed, self-corrections), visual percept...

This article provides the first empirical test of the idea that discrepancy is not needed in order to arouse cognitive dissonance. Dissonance was aroused when Ss felt responsible for some aversive consequence, regardless of whether their behavior was consistent (writing a proattitudinal essay) or inconsistent (a counterattitudinal essay) with beliefs. The data demonstrate that in both situation...

The present study sought to investigate the effect of Critical Language Awareness (CLA) on upper-intermediate EFL learners’ writing ability. Thirty-two EFL learners were selected based on their scores on a placement test and were randomly assigned to control and experimental groups. In addition to the placement test, a five-paragraph essay writing test was administered to assess the partici...

  This study investigated the effect of gender and type of written corrective feedback (WCF) on Iranian pre-intermediate EFL learners’ writing. Four intact classes were assigned to experimental and two intact classes to control groups. The learners were homogenized using a pre-test which was followed by sixteen sessions lasting one hour and forty five minutes. After receiving instruction on how...

Lewis (1993) recognized significance of word combinations including collocations by presenting lexical approach. Because of the crucial role of collocation in vocabulary acquisition, this research set out to evaluate the rate of collocations in Iranian EFL learners' writing production across L1 and L2. In addition, L1 interference with L2 collocational use in the learner' writing samples was st...