second language writing

Essay genres are often employed to assess learning at higher education. Students are sometimes required to write essay in examinations and assignments. The expectations of assessors in writing essays are students’ ability to present analytical and reasoned arguments and to engage with alternative viewpoints. In fact, in evaluating essays, assessors consider the extent to which a student is able to meet these expectations. However, students may have challenges meeting these expectations and instructors, particularly instructors in the discipline, may not be prepared to provide students with an explicit linguistic description of how these expectations are met. Thus, this study draws from Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) to scaffold students’ challenges in meeting the expectations of essay genre. In fact, it uses Dreyfus et al’s (2010) 3 x 3 linguistic toolkit to analyze essays written by postgraduate students in the department of English at one university in India. The 3 x 3 linguistic toolkit is used to zoom in student’s challenges in controlling the resources of SFL’s three metafunctions (ideational, interpersonal, and textual) at the level of whole text, paragraph, and sentence. After the analysis, the findings revealed that students face challenges controlling the resources of the three modes of meaning at all levels. These challenges include difficulties in grammar, lexical choices, punctuation, following expected organization, answering the question, the use of signposts to create a coherent text, and the use of engagement resources to develop a consistent argument. This study has implications for teaching and assessing academic writing.

The present study aimed at providing a typology of Iranian supervisors’ written feedback on L2 graduate students’ theses/dissertations and examining the way different speech functions are employed to put the supervisors’ thoughts and feelings into words. In so doing, a corpus of comments, including 15,198 comments provided on 87 TEFL theses and dissertations by 30 supervisors were analyzed. We employed an inductive category formation procedure to form the typology of comments, and followed a deductive procedure to put the comments into the three categories of expressive, referential, and directive speech functions. The findings showed that supervisors provided seven main categories of comments on theses and dissertations: grammar and sentence structure, content, method, organization, references, formatting, and academic procedures. Furthermore, the findings indicated that supervisors employed comments with different patterns and for different purposes on MA and PhD students’ texts.

With the latest paradigm shift in SLA from Cognitivism to Sociocultural Theory (SCT), more studies are carried out to investigate the efficacy of Written Corrective Feedback (WCF) through a social and cultural lens. A more recent offspring of SCT is Activity Theory which provides an explanatory framework for scrutinizing an activity in a social setting. The present study aimed at investigating the impact of Scaffolded WCF within the framework of Activity Theory on Iranian EFL learners’ writing performance in terms of reduction of the learners’ writing errors with respect to the content, vocabulary, mechanics, organization, and grammar. Finally, different types of Activity Theory-based strategic mediations (i.e. artifact, rule, community, and role mediations) Iranian EFL learners employed in their writing revisions were investigated. Accordingly, 25 Iranian university-level students, through convenient sampling, were chosen to participate in the study. The treatment they received on their writings was a graduated Scaffolding WCF in their Zone of Proximal Development in the form of both peer and teacher feedback. The findings indicated that Scaffolded WCF statistically significantly contributed to the participants’ writing performance in terms of content, vocabulary, mechanics, organization, and grammar. With respect to the mediation strategies used by the learners, it was discovered that the learners benefitted from all the available mediators although with various degrees. It is hoped that the findings of this study will promise implications for promoting a teacher/learner-friendly method of providing WCF based on SCT, which can be utilized in large classes typical of Iranian EFL university courses.

Scholarly publication has turned into a growing concern affecting the lives of academics across the world. The increasing demand by higher education institutions for publications in high-profile venues has created various policy issues, including the ones about the language of publication, and more specifically, about writing and publishing in English by speakers of other languages. In this study, we investigate policies of publishing in English in Iranian higher education based on qualitative content analysis of 30 national policy documents and 170 university bylaws released by 46 Iranian universities over the past twenty-three years. The emerging policy lines reveal that the research evaluation system and the structure of incentives as well as institutional pressure mechanisms all tend to act in favor of publishing in English in a context where it is the academic language of only a small minority. The implications of such policy directions for higher education in Iran are discussed along with possible messages for other contexts around the world.

Among four language skills, writing is a complex and demandingcognitive process.Writing is an important tool in evaluationwhere English proficiency needs to be assessed. The present study aimed to explore the impact of feedback provided by Grammarly Software compared to teachers’ feedback on the writing ability of Iranian EFL learners. Through the nonrandom sampling method, 60 intermediate male and female EFL learners were selected, then they were randomly assigned to two main groups: the experimental and control group. The participants were administered the Oxford Placement Test (OQPT), Pretest of Essay Writing, Grammarly software program, Posttest of Essay Writing, and an attitude questionnaire in ten sessions. The data gathered from the comparison of pretest and posttest revealed that the experimental group members outperformed those in the control group, meaning that the Grammarly software program positively affected the EFL learners' writing ability. The results might have implications for language teachers, learners, and materials developers.