Showing papers in "Journal of Second Language Writing in 2015"

TL;DR: Differences in the syntactic complexity in English writing among college-level writers with different first language (L1) backgrounds are explored and varied patterns for L2 writing research and pedagogy and for automatic native language identification of learner texts are considered.

TL;DR: In this article, a naturalistic case study involving four non-English major Chinese EFL learners was conducted to explore how learners cognitively, behaviorally, and affectively engage with written corrective feedback (WCF).

TL;DR: It was found that topic had a significant effect on syntactic complexity features of the essays, with one topic eliciting a higher amount of subordination and greater global sentence complexity and the other eliciting more elaboration at the finite clause level.

TL;DR: The authors reviewed the state-of-the-art research on the effectiveness of corrective feedback (CF) in L2 writing using meta-analytic procedures and compared the results with results in general L2 study metaanalytical research and offer suggestions to guide future written CF studies.

TL;DR: Investigation of how Criterion affected writing instruction and performance suggested that Criterion has led to increased revisions, and that the corrective feedback from Criterion helped improve accuracy from a rough to a final draft.

TL;DR: This commentary to the Special Issue identifies four themes that arise from the contributions that each study makes to the study of syntactic complexity in L2 writing and several other themes that stem from the collective findings from the five studies and which connect with the general landscape of the research domain.

TL;DR: The findings suggest that despite no explicit focus on lexis and syntax in the EAP programme, by the end of the course the students’ writing exhibited a developmentally more advanced repertoire of lexical and syntactic choices that are characteristic of expository texts in academic contexts.

TL;DR: The study found that students’ writing improved after three years of study but only in terms of fluency; changes in accuracy, grammatical and lexical complexity, as well as global scores of writing fell short of significance.

TL;DR: The authors investigated teacher feedback beliefs and practices of a pre-service L2 writing teacher over one academic semester, where students' essays were coded for four types of written corrective feedback (direct, direct with explanation, indirect, indirect with explanation) and compared to Kim's beliefs, as discussed in her journals and interviews.

TL;DR: This article examined the relationship between increases in cognitive task complexity and the writing of intermediate L2 writers of English and found a significant effect for task complexity on decreases in syntactic complexity using a ratio of dependent clauses to T-units measure.

TL;DR: Examination of the role of two instructional interventions related to task implementation—the amount of task structure and inclusion of language support—in promoting accurate and complex writing via text chat by L2 learners in a classroom setting found evidence that task complexity influenced the accuracy of student writing in line with the Cognition Hypothesis.

TL;DR: The findings indicate that structured collaborative prewriting tasks elicited student talk about content and organization, but there is only a moderate relationships between these prewriting discussions and the students’ written texts.

TL;DR: Findings suggest that the relationship between task complexity in L2/FL writing and the effect on attentional resources and CAF measures may be associated with the language proficiency level ( Norris & Ortega, 2009 ) in conjunction with the level of expertise in writing of the learner.

TL;DR: In this paper, the trajectory of a Japanese student in negotiating the classroom affordances provided by a dialogical pedagogy to construct her desired voice is reported. And the authors reveal the components that are amalgamated, process of dialogicality, and the challenges in achieving a co-constructed voice.

TL;DR: This paper investigated the changes in foreign language (FL) writers' genre awareness and meaning-making choices when instantiating the genre of summary over a semester-long course and concluded that SFL can provide a renewed understanding of FL writers' development and help writing-to-learn and learning-towrite fruitfully cross-pollinate to enhance the FL development of students.

TL;DR: An analysis of an advanced L2 writing task demonstrates precisely how nominalizations as GMs enable the L2 writer to meet the complexity of these demands through conceptual refiguration of experience and configuration or development of concepts in texts.

TL;DR: This article examined writing as a sociocognitive process in which mind, body, and ecosocial world function integratively/ecologically rather than as separate phenomena, and discussed implications of this research for the SLW field.

TL;DR: The results show that not only ubiquitous global measures of Syntactic complexity but also more specific measures, namely frequencies of syntactic modifiers, can serve as developmental indices at beginning L2 proficiency levels and demonstrates the necessity of simultaneous investigations of linguistic development in groups and individuals.

TL;DR: The authors conducted a case study on students' perceptions of what it means to "do" academic writing in their first year at university and found that the social context relevant for student writing includes but extends beyond the formal and academic, and embraces spaces and practices outside the institution.

TL;DR: It is implied that more awareness of re-usable academic phrases would be useful to L2 writers, as there was some disparity in tutors’ views of these phrases if they were identified by text-matching software.

TL;DR: The authors examined English teachers' concerns in the act of editing, and the strategies they employed when grappling with uncertainty, and found that the three most common concerns identified in think-aloud transcripts were, in order, non-technical word usage, content/meaning issues, and technical term usage.

TL;DR: This article examined two pre-service ESL writing teachers' developing understanding of the concept of parallelism within a team microteaching assignment in a TESL methodology course and found that novice teachers engage in an extended process of learning and that how the two teachers interacted with the available mediation differed based on their underlying conceptions of writing.