This study integrates a larger research empirical project that examines second language (SL) learners’ profiles and valid procedures to perform complete and diagnostic assessment in schools. 102 learners of Portuguese as a SL aged 7 and 17 years speakers of distinct home languages were assessed in several linguistic tasks. In this article, we focused on writing performance in the specific task ...

willingness to communicate and motivation can be two important affective variables to cause success in language achievement. the current study aimed to investigate the role of willingness to communicate (wtc) and second language motivational self-system (l2mss) in relation to learners’ language achieve- ment. to this end, 100 homogeneous learners both male and female aged from 16 to 20 were cho...

Recent findings have provided growing evidence in support of process-genre-oriented writing pedagogy. However, these types approaches tended to place form-focused instruction (FFI) the background, particularly explicit teaching grammar (i.e., isolated FFI). As such, limited improvement accuracy was reported by recent studies. It is, therefore, important look into how FFI might further improve t...

INTRODUCTION The dictionary is one of the common learning tools for second and foreign language learners. Various types of dictionaries are used to help learners work on their language development. A bilingual dictionary is often the first dictionary that a foreign language learner encounters. A study conducted on dictionary usage in seven European countries, including over 1,100 learners of En...

We describe a computational system for automatic analysis of syntactic complexity in second language writing using fourteen different measures that have been explored or proposed in studies of second language development. The system takes a written language sample as input and produces fourteen indices of syntactic complexity of the sample based on these measures. The system is designed with ad...

This paper describes the creation of the first large-scale corpus containing drafts and final versions of essays written by non-native speakers, with the sentences aligned across different versions. Furthermore, the sentences in the drafts are annotated with comments from teachers. The corpus is intended to support research on textual revision by language learners, and how it is influenced by f...

This paper reports on the recognition component of an intelligent tutoring system that is designed to help foreign language speakers learn standard English. The system models the grammar of the learner, with this instantiation of the system tailored to signers of American Sign Language (ASL). We discuss the theoretical motivations for the system, various difficulties that have been encountered ...

This paper aims at providing a comprehensive review of previous research on second language (L2) writing. Major issues and the relevant findings from five areas of inquiry into L2 writing are presented, namely, L2 writers’ characteristics, the L2 writing process, L2 writing feedback, L2 writing instruction, and L2 writers’ texts. It is found that L2 writing is quite a complex process which invo...