This study modeled the effects of essay length and language features on the rated quality of second language (L2) expository and argumentative essays composed by Chinese university students. Latent variables were writing quality captured by essay scores, and lexical sophistication, syntactic complexity and cohesion, each of which was measured by…

Within the context of Chinese university education, effective communication in the field of second language writing heavily relies on lexical complexity, yet the role of writing feedback perception in relation to lexical complexity remains elusive. This study introduces a comprehensive writing feedback perception model encompassing perceptions of…

Focused on the effects of different type of feedback on learners' written products, research on written corrective feedback (WCF) has cast second language writers as passive recipients rather than proactive agents in the feedback process. Revisiting the notion of WCF, this study introduces the notion of feedback-seeking behavior (Ashford &…

Previous research is seldom addressed to biliteracy relationship for adult learners in the foreign language context. The present study was a repeated-measure design in a 9-month longitudinal study. One hundred and thirty-nine college students (ages 19-21 years) who learned English as a foreign language were measured twice at pre- and post-tests on…

Though essay writing is an essential part of postsecondary education, it can be challenging for second language learners, who are required to organize ideas coherently in a language which they have not fully mastered. The present study examined perceptions of draft-writing by students who speak Arabic as their first language and Hebrew as their…

This study investigated how experience with a first language (L1) writing system affects the development of the second language (L2) word recognition subskills and how L2 linguistic knowledge constrains such L1 impacts. In this study, word recognition is conceptualized as a complex construct that entails multiple subskills necessary for…

Graphotactic as well as phonological factors influence native English speakers' decisions about consonant doubling in the spelling of nonwords, e.g., "zimen" versus "zimmen." This study examined the extent to which such influences apply to non-native speakers of English, who presumably have less knowledge of English…

This study investigated whether orthographic consistency and individual learner differences including working memory (WM), first language (L1) background, and second language (L2) proficiency affect Chinese L2 learners' literacy acquisition. Seventy American college students in beginning or intermediate Chinese classes participated in a character…

This study investigated whether German learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) acquire additional recoding strategies that they do not need for recoding in the consistent German orthography. Based on the psycholinguistic grain size theory (Ziegler & Goswami, 2005) we expected students with little experience in EFL to use the same…

The present study examined the influence of the features of Chinese characters, such as frequency, regularity and consistency, on the accuracy with which they were read by two groups of adult Chinese learners. Twenty-two English-speakers and 31 Japanese-speakers studying Chinese at a Taiwanese University read 130 Chinese characters that varied…

While a number of studies have investigated the influence of background knowledge and reading comprehension strategies on comprehension, no L2 research exists examining and comparing the unique contributions of these two variables examined together. Therefore, the purpose of this exploratory study was to investigate the combined and individual…

This study was designed to identify underlying factors that motivate language learners to read in a foreign language (L2) context. It also examined the relationships between L1 and L2 reading motivation and any differences in reading motivation based on the learners' academic majors and L2 reading proficiency. 259 Korean EFL college students…

The present study examined cross-linguistic relationships between phonological awareness in L1 (Hebrew) and L2 (English) among normal (N = 30) and reading disabled (N = 30) Hebrew native speaking college students. Further, it tested the effect of two factors: the lexical status of the stimulus word (real word vs. pseudoword) and the linguistic…