Many previous studies have compared automated analyses to writing experts' assessments, and less is known about the relationship between such features and content instructors' assessments of writing. The data analysed in this study is part of a larger study investigating growth in academic writing skills during undergraduate study. In this…

One of the most significant and yet often overlooked challenges for university students is decoding what their instructors expect from their assignments. Better understanding those expectations and the vocabulary and grammar needed to achieve them are the motivations behind this investigation. Eleven experienced instructors within an Australian…

This essay examines the potential impact of paid-for or premium language models, where some students may be able to afford advanced models generating superior outputs while others could face inequities due to financial constraints. It explores how this dynamic can exacerbate the digital divide, challenge traditional as well as more recent…

Background: Generative artificial intelligence (AI) represents a potentially powerful, time-saving tool for grading student essays. However, little is known about how AI-generated essay scores compare to human instructor scores. Objective: The purpose of this study was to compare the essay grading scores produced by AI with those of human…

A longstanding criticism of traditional high-stakes writing assessments is their use of static prompts in which test takers compose a single text in response to a prompt. These static prompts do not allow measurement of the writing process. This paper describes the development and validation of an innovative interactive writing task. After the…

Feedback is crucial in the learning process, yet many students struggle to engage with teacher feedback effectively. This study explores the potential of Generative Artificial Intelligence (gen-AI) to enhance student engagement with feedback in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) writing. Using a mixed-methods approach involving surveys and…

While extensive research exists on peer feedback and its effects on writing, there are few experimental studies that rigorously investigate the effects of guided dialogic peer feedback on students' argumentative writing performance. This study, adopting a mixed-methods approach, examined the influence of guided dialogic peer feedback within a…

While the use of collaborative peer editing is widespread in some online learning contexts, little is known about how constituent editing behaviours impact student writing quality when using shared online documents as the mediating tool. Therefore, the present study (n = 176) examines the effects of English language learners' peer editing…

In recent years, there has been a growing trend of using informal styles in academic writing, including research articles. To examine the degree of formality in students' writing, this corpus-based study aimed to analyze the formal linguistic features in the academic writing assignments of English-major students at a Thai university. The learner…

This study investigates task-specific emotions, examining how they arise and impact performance in a second language writing task through the lens of control-value theory and a positive psychology (PP) perspective. Participants were 206 secondary English-as-a-foreign-language learners from rural China. They completed an English argumentative…

This study conducts a comprehensive analysis of the assessment of journal writing in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) at the secondary school level, comparing the performance of a Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) platform with two human graders. Employing a convergent parallel mixed methods design, quantitative data were collected…