Nominalization Versus Clause Usage in CALL Technology-Mediated Acquisition of EFL Learners' Writing Skills

Abstract

To help EFL learners realize the use of nominals and clauses in practicing productive skills of academic writing in English writing tests, experiments have been exploited using the tasks similar to those of internet-based test of English as a foreign language to determine the nominal and clause level information during sentence and paragraph processing. Subjects were placed in two groups (the treatment group and the control group) and comprised English intermediate level students at a university in Vietnam performing compositions that were of lexical and clausal congruence but the congruence with discourse context was manipulated. The results indicated that lexical and clausal processing and discourse congruence have an effect on each other and influence writing skills. The study was undertaken as a basis for improving the technology-linguistics combined intake of learners' knowledge in order to accelerate the acquisition of foreign languages and will benefit future research related to computerized writing and assessment of writing.