From a cross-linguistic and cross-cultural perspective, this paper reports on the findings of an exploratory study examining the features of the academic texts produced by three groups of postgraduates: native speakers of Turkish (TL1), English (EL1) and Turkish speakers of English (EL2). To this end, the study involves a microdiscourse analysis…

This study investigates how linguistic devices are used to convey authorial stance in 36 Introduction sections and 36 Discussion sections of doctoral dissertations written in English by Thai students graduated in language education from different universities in the United States during the period 2008 to 2013. It also compares the use of…

Plagiarism in ESL and EFL learning contexts has become a topic engaging many researchers in a hot debate in recent years. Comparisons of student-generated texts with their source texts have shown that students rely amply on source texts in their writings, using copying as a major strategy. The students themselves relate these problems to their…

Using reporting verbs in research writing seems to be a problem for graduate students (or novice researchers) when writing a research paper. The aim of this paper is to raise the awareness of students in using reporting verbs. The main argument in this paper is based on the comparison of reporting verbs used by two expert researchers and two Thai…

This article investigates the role of direct corpus use in learners' collocational competence in academic writing. An experiment was conducted between two groups of Chinese postgraduates who had no previous knowledge of corpora. It was embedded in a regular 4-month linguistics course in the students' programmes, where a corpus-assisted method was…

This study investigates differences in the language and discourse characteristics of course blogs and traditional academic submissions produced in English by native (L1) and advanced second language (L2) writers. One hundred and fifty-two texts generated by 38 graduate students within the context of the same Master's level course were analysed…

Researchers interested in psychological factors affecting writers in higher-education institutions, or academic writers, are concerned with internal variables affecting writing productivity; however few empirical studies explore these factors with samples of students who are in the process of earning master's or doctoral degrees (i.e., graduate…

Demonstrative "this" is worthy to investigate because of the role of "this" as a common cohesive device in academic writing. This study attempted to find out the variables underlying the realization of demonstrative "this" in graduate-student writing of Semarang State University, Indonesia. The data of the study were…

This is a corpus-based study of a key aspect of academic writing in one discipline (biology) by final-year undergraduates and first-, second-, and third-year graduate students. The papers come from the Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers, a freely available electronic database. The principal aim of the study is to examine the extent of…

Ten adult readers, advanced in their control of two languages, Korean and English, were recruited for a study of academic literacy practices to examine the various linguistic repertoires on which they drew. Analysis of their language use revealed many instances of "translanguaging," that is, a flexible reliance on two languages to serve…

This study addresses the current debate about the beneficial effects of text processing software on students with different working memory (WM) during the process of academic writing, especially with regard to the ability to display higher-level conceptual thinking. A total of 54 graduate students (15 male, 39 female) wrote one essay by hand and…

To better understand the promising effects of data-driven learning (DDL) on language learning processes and outcomes, this study explored DDL learning events enabled by the Research Writing Tutor (RWT), a web-based platform containing an English language corpus annotated to enhance rhetorical input, a concordancer that was searchable for…

In this study we compare test takers' performance on the Speaking section of the TOEFL iBT™and their performances during their real-life academic studies. Thirty international graduate students from mixed language backgrounds in two different disciplines (Sciences and Social Sciences) responded to two independent and four integrated speaking tasks…

The use of anti-plagiarism services has grown very quickly in recent years to the point where over half of American universities now have a license. The most popular of these services, Turnitin, claims that it is licensed in 126 countries and available in 10 languages suggesting that the service is becoming widely used around the world. In order…

Recognizing that graduate students seldom have the opportunity to participate collaboratively, either in providing or receiving feedback to improve their academic writing skills, this study reports on the design of a computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) system used to investigate how graduate students transform and construct their…