Although writing is considered one of the most essential foreign language skills, to nurture and develop writing skills among students is challenging. To overcome this, teachers have recently considered benefiting from digital technology. Self-monitoring and self-evaluation, as sub-skills of metacognition, in addition to scaffolding, might be…

The emerging paradigm shift in educational contexts from walled classroom environments to virtual, hybrid, blended, and lately personal learning environments has brought about vast changes in the foreign language classroom practices. Numerous calls for experimenting with new instructional treatments to enhance students' language performance in…

In this paper, the authors discuss the findings of a quasi-experimental study of the flipped learning approach in an EFL environment. The authors investigated the composition-writing proficiency of two groups of Japanese university students (n = 38). The teacher of one of these groups had had much experience teaching with the flipped learning…

Facebook has best leveraged the rapid technological and societal changes over the past decade to grow into the world's largest social-networking site (SNS). However, research of Facebook has lagged behind other Web 2.0 technologies, particularly in regards to investigating its efficacy versus a control group to improve L2 writing. This study,…

This quasi-experimental study examined whether there was any difference in the quantity and quality of the written texts produced by two groups (N = 18) of intermediate Chinese language learners. Over one semester, students in the experimental (E) group wrote weekly updates and comments in Chinese on a designated Facebook group page, while…

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of blogging and portfolio keeping on a group of pre-service teachers' writing skill in a compulsory writing course at a tertiary level English language teaching (ELT) programme in Turkey. The study specifically looked into to what extent receiving feedback from course instructor and peers…

Despite having studied English for some 33 months, the students at the private junior high school in Japan described in this paper had never before been asked to write original compositions in the language. The researchers undertook a quasi-experimental pilot study in which the 156 (n= 156) participants were each asked to write four compositions,…

Community colleges play an important role in providing first and second generation immigrants access to higher education and the opportunity to earn a postsecondary credential. However, immigrant students may face obstacles in pursuit of a postsecondary degree, particularly second language challenges that can inhibit their success in college-level…