“Mr Paul, please inform me accordingly”

PurposeThe importance of critical thinking disposition (CTD) in second language (L2) university students' writing is a topic rarely discussed. The purpose of this research paper is to examine L2 university students' CTD during the writing process. Research questions discussed in this paper encompass the CT dispositions and characteristics of L2 university students in online writing environments. Measuring CTD and CTD training via online collaborative peer review were the two grounding themes of this study.Design/methodology/approachA five‐point Likert scale online questionnaire which included two open‐ended questions was developed to assess CTD. A factor analysis and a cluster analysis were preformed on the data. A discriminate analysis determined the number of viable clusters and a one‐way ANOVA was performed to compare differences, with qualitative interview data to supplement. The data set for CTD measurement was a matrix consisting of 27 participants and P variables.FindingsThe findings reveal that the CTD characteristics of L2s include open‐mindedness, systematicity and inquisitiveness, and low interaction/motivation.Research limitations/implicationsLimitations include a small sample size that mimics the researcher's anticipations, but the findings would be strengthened by a larger sample. A lack of sensitivity and generalisability could be corrected in the future by using broader subject matter within an online educational web site.Originality/valueKnowledge of the CTD characteristics of L2s would allow interface designers to take into account different CTDs in developing L2 online collaborative educational web sites. This study outlines the first step in developing online collaborative educational games that allow L2 university students to improve their writing abilities by considering various CTDs.

The Effects of ChatGPT on Politeness in L2 University Students’ Email Requests to Faculty

Few studies have investigated the impact of English language programs on second language (L2) students studying in Canadian universities (Cheng & Fox, 2008; Fox, 2005, 2009). This article reports on questionnaire responses of 641 L2 students studying in 36 English language programs in 26 Canadian universities. The researchers identified programs by their activity emphasis as either English as a second language (ESL) or English for academic purposes (EAP). Activity emphasizing speaking, social interaction, and general language development was viewed as ESL, whereas activity that emphasized academic reading, writing, and language development was considered EAP. The researchers used structural equation modeling procedures to examine the network of relationships between language program emphasis and participants' background characteristics in influencing academic and social engagement. A model of moderated mediation (Wu & Zumbo, 2008) was confirmed; that is, language program activities were found to account for variation in strategies which mediated academic and social engagement. However, the impact was moderated (lessened or strengthened) by three personal background factors: anxiety, stress, and motivation. This study refines our understanding of the positive impact of ESL and EAP programs on L2 university students' academic and social engagement.

Although there is no lack of studies on L2 motivation in applied linguistics, research on L2 writing motivation remains scanty. Drawing upon Dornyei’s L2-motivational-self-system and the notions of identity, this study analyzed 27 Chinese university-based students’ English writing learning experiences. Data were gathered through individual interviews and written reflections. The findings showed that the students’ experience of learning to write was not conducive to their formation of identity as a multilingual writer because their ideal L2 selves in EFL writing were influenced by the overall learning and testing cultures. The findings also reveal that the teachers, parents, and schools played little role in shaping the students’ ought-to selves due to the marginal status of EFL writing in both the nation-wide exams and the institutional curricula. Overall, the students’ investment in learning to write yielded mostly a “passive and mediocre test-oriented” writer identity, with the capital to construct customized writings for individual and professional communication remained unattainable. The findings call for attention to the prevalent native speaker ideology and the ideology that considers students’ L1 as problem.

Although research has investigated laughter in professional communication settings, fewer studies have explored laughter-talk in second language (L2) classrooms. This study examines L2 university students’ use of laughter-talk in peer group conversation to understand the linguistics of affect and its interactional effects. The author draws upon interactional perspectives on language play and laughter to analyse classroom conversation from four peer groups in three tasks. The author has worked within Partington’s (2006) framework of laughter-talk to bridge the gap between professional communication and classroom discourse. Through specific examples of language-related and general laughter excerpts, this study shows that the L2 students could use different functions of laughter in multilingual and multicultural conversation for managing insufficient linguistic knowledge and displaying participant alignment and affiliation. This study has suggested that L2 university students’ emerging processes of laughter-talk may lead to their playful acquisition of specific interactional features necessary for professional communication.

The pervasive phenomenon of metadiscourse – commentary on the ongoing discourse – is beginning to take its rightful place among the major topics of discourse studies. This book makes simultaneous contributions to the theory of metadiscourse, corpus-based methods of studying such phenomena, and our knowledge of metadiscourse use in written English. After comprehensively reviewing previous research, it introduces a more rigorous and empirical approach to metadiscourse studies. Ädel presents a new model of metadiscourse based on Jakobson’s functions of language, and other conceptual tools, including explicit features for defining metadiscourse, a taxonomy of the functions it serves, and maps of the boundaries between it and related phenomena. A large-scale study of writing by L1 and L2 university students is presented, in which the L2 speakers’ overuse of metadiscourse strongly marks them as lacking in communicative competence. This work is of interest both to linguists and to educators concerned with writing in English.

This chapter presents the first of seven studies that evaluate lexical facility as a second language (L2) vocabulary construct. Study 1 examines the sensitivity of the lexical facility measures to differences in three university English populations, and a preuniversity group of L2 English students in a university language program, L2 university students, and first language (L1) university students. The sensitivity of the three measures (vocabulary size, mean recognition speed, and recognition speed consistency) to group differences is examined for each measure individually and as composites. Construct validity is also established by comparing performance across frequency levels.

Cohesion plays an important role in ensuring clarity, appropriateness, and comprehensibility in text. This study compares L1-Chinese and L1-English university students’ use of cohesion in English essays and examines the cohesive features in academic writing of L2 students from three perspectives: density of cohesion, distribution of cohesive devices, and distance of cohesive ties. Data consist of 126 student-produced essays in two corpora: 63 by L1-Chinese students from the TECCL corpus and 63 by L1-English students from the BAWE corpus. Findings indicate that L2 students have a lower density of cohesion in their academic writing. Their essays are marked by underuse of lexical cohesion and demonstrative reference, initial positioning of conjunctions, and heavy use of temporal conjunction. In addition, L2 students use significantly fewer immediate and remote cohesive ties, and the length of the material between ties is found to be inadequate compared to L1 students’ writing. The study has important implications for L2 writing pedagogy in China.

Citation practices of L2 university students in first-year writing: Form, function, and stance

Adjusting to English-medium instruction in higher education can be one of the most challenging obstacles that students face when they have previously been educated through another language, in this case Arabic. In writing courses, in particular, students have difficulty coping with language demands, which sometimes leads them to rely on classmates with stronger English language skills. Instead of viewing such a strategy as counter-productive to the learning process, students at times blame external factors as an explanation of the behavior. This situation led communication faculty at an English-medium institution to design a positive intervention in the form of a workshop. The purpose of the workshop was to encourage students to take personal responsibility for their education during the first year of their studies. An emphasis was placed on the resulting consequences of taking personal responsibility: an increase in positivity, self-image and self-confidence; the assumption being that these outcomes could enhance learning and reduce transition-related challenges. In this paper, two iterations of the workshop (face-to-face and online) will be evaluated by discussing the design, the strengths and weaknesses of both workshops, and data gathered from students’ responsibility journals. Finally, recommendations and suggested future areas of research are presented.

The majority of foreign language learning (FLL) has recently been conducted online due to unprecedented changes in society and this trend seems to be global and perpetual even if the situation changes. Unfortunately, there is still low awareness among language instructors of the impact it may have on the corrective feedback they provide to their students. Traditionally, corrective feedback was provided to the students during or after the class orally or in written form, but the personal aspect of this feedback was present throughout the evaluation process. With digital media, the situation is rather different caused by the remoteness of the learning process participants. The present systematic review attempts to provide a systematic summary of cutting-edge research into the topic of corrective feedback with the use of emerging technologies for FLL in the university context. The findings indicate that there is not much awareness of the specific context of digital corrective feedback among tutors. Moreover, from an objective perspective, it seems that digital corrective feedback can be very efficient if applied correctly. The review provides a summary of new trends but calls for a more systematic and analytical approach to the topic that is still rather neglected in the studies currently available.

Writing in an electronic age: A case study of L2 composing processes

Although there are numerous studies on collocation in English writing by L2 university students, little is known about the problems encountered by mature researchers writing authentic L2 English texts in their fields. This study investigates collocation issues in L2 English research papers in Brazil. Its starting point was the compilation of the Brazilian Academic Corpus of English (BrACE), a 906,035-word multidisciplinary corpus of journal articles written in English that have been published in Brazilian journals. The most frequent noun collocations in this corpus were contrasted with the expert writing lexical database underlying the ColloCaid academic writing assistant. No evidence of systematic miscollocation was found in the published papers represented in BrACE. However, many general academic English collocations were conspicuous by their absence from BrACE, including collocations with L1 Portuguese cognates. We also observed that the collocations in BrACE were less diverse and tended to score higher in terms of strength of association than their equivalents in the reference data. In addition to feedback on miscollocations which might arise in unedited manuscripts, our findings to conclude that Brazilian (and other English L2) research writers can benefit from suggestions to expand their collocation repertoire, enhance their perceptions of collocation strength, and offset collocation avoidance.

The present study investigates the effects of Revision Strategy (RS) on Argumentative Essay (AE) writing. Specifically, the study provides an analysis of 58 short AEs written by L1 and L2 university students. Two different levels of errors are examined: linguistic (Spelling, (Morpho)syntax, Lexicon, Syntax, Punctuation) and structure (Text structure and Coherence) errors, in order to measure how RS influences the texts. The comparison between RS and non-RS samples shows a significant difference in favour of texts with RS. In fact, we can surmise that RS positively influences text production both in L1 and L2 writing. In the third section we provide a quantitative analysis of the errors and we find some common issues within the specific rhetorical and linguistic framework of AE.

From Summarizing to Stance-Taking: Combining Genre Pedagogy and Academic Literacies to Help L2 University Students in Sweden to Write Literature Reviews in Social Sciences and Humanities