Typically developing writers in fifth (n = 110, M = 10 years 8 months) or seventh (n = 97, M = 12 years 7 months) grade wrote informative, compare and contrast, and persuasive essays for which the content was held constant-two mountains with a history of volcanic eruption. Relevant background knowledge was provided by reading text and showing colorful illustrations to the students before writin...

Designing appropriate materials and activities to enhance vocabulary learning is one of the primary goals of language courses. Among the claims about efficient pedagogical tasks is the Involvement Load Hypothesis (Laufer & Hulstijn, 2001) according to which vocabulary development is contingent on the amount of cognitive process a task involves. Building on the previous research on this hypothes...

College students often listen to music while they use a computer. This experiment investigated whether background music disrupts their ability to word process ̄uently and e€ectively. Forty-®ve psychology undergraduates wrote brief expository essays. Background music signi®cantly disrupted writing ̄uency (words generated per minute controlling for typing speed and including those words deleted b...

Hedges, as tools to express tentativeness and doubt, have been studied in plenty of research papers in the Iranian EFL research setting. However, their use in a learner corpus, portraying Iranian learner English, is in need of more research attention. With this end in view, this study aimed at investigating how Iranian EFL learners who have majored in English-related fields in Iran deployed hed...

Argumentation skills of secondary school students were evaluated in Finland (n=290), France (n=54), and England (n=41). The data were collected from 4 tasks comprising 7 variables. The results indicated that most of the students had correctly justified arguments and conclusions, and composed clear claims and relevant arguments. However, many students had difficulties in recognising the main cla...

This study aims to examine the relationship between productive knowledge of some lexical and phraseological indices quality English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners’ writing. A sample 120 expository essays, written by semesters 1 5 university students in less proficient EFL context, are rated human evaluators automatically examined for target indices. The results show that, unlike index div...