Paraphrasing is a key skill for EAP students, and there are numerous techniques and tools that they can use to help them paraphrase. Whether they use these tools effectively to produce good paraphrases, though, is another question. A question, in fact, that Carol Bailey and Judi Withers at the University of Wolverhampton (UK) investigated in detail. This article is the report on their study, with its interesting findings and some useful take-aways for EAP teachers.
Marshall and Walsh Marr (2018) investigated faculty perceptions of teaching multilingual students in writing-intensive classrooms. They found that most instructors view students in binary terms, which may negatively influence the pedagogical methods they employ in classrooms where typical binary categorizations are often blurred.
Language Learning Social Network Sites (LLSNS) combine tutorial software and opportunities to interact with others in order to improve one’s foreign language competence. However, details on how learners use these platforms and what they learn from them are rarely found in the research literature. This survey study by Chin-Hsi, Warschauer and Blake (2016) investigated learners’ attitudes towards, usage of, and progress made on Livemocha, a popular LLSNS. The results show the potential of these sites for language learning, but also some key questions that need to be answered before LLSNS-use can bring about real success.
This paper explores students attempts at Grammatical Metaphor through the use of nominalization. Student errors with nominalization are identified to create a framework of the intermediary stages students pass through as their writing develops.
Benefitting from 20 years of development in the fields of L2 writing and Writing Program Administration (WPA), Tardy and Whittig provide a timely update to Silva’s ethical imperative that moves beyond mere classroom concerns to how L2 writers are positioned by dominant discourses in the institution and how L2 writing specialists must be prepared to serve as an advocate for these students.
This post extends the work about Automatic Writing Evaluation software (AWEs) by providing concrete recommendations, especially about usability, that may be useful to L2 writing specialists.
Cavaleri and Dianati’s (2016) article discussed how students at their institution reacted to using Grammarly to support their writing.
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Last week, I wrote about the ambiguity of research on written corrective feedback (WCF), with some scholars arguing it works…
This article is Part I in a two-part series on error correction. It looks at the lack of evidence that proves written corrective feedback’s effectiveness and why that may be so.
This article reports on a corpus-based study of the discourse of university lectures, which aimed to identify linguistic patterns that could help EAP / L2 students with note-taking. It finds some ‘standard’ formulaic expressions, as well as other discourse markers used by lecturers to highlight key terms or concepts.
