Search

The purpose of this study was to explore the topic selection tendencies of university students among a given topic list and to reveal what reasons students had in deciding on the topic to write about. The study was designed as a case study. 37 students studying at a state university in Konya Province, Turkey were determined as a study group. The findings obtained from the interviews were analyzed by content analysis method. The students were given six different essay topics each week, three of which were about their field while the rest was related to general writing topics. The obtained findings showed that some of the students preferred writing about general topics while some others preferred to write about a topic that was related to their field. Students stated that prior knowledge, difficulty of the topic, lack of sufficient knowledge on the topic were among the reasons affecting topic selection process. Students stated that writing about self-selected topics were effective in terms of improving English vocabulary knowledge, grammar knowledge, developing English thinking skill, affective development, and field knowledge development. Furthermore, they indicated that this writing process enabled them to learn English essay types better, improved their organization skill in writing, helped them write in English in a shorter time, helped them produce more comprehensive English sentences, express their opinions better by writing, writing thesis statement and writing different introduction sentences. [Note: The publication year (2022) shown on the PDF is incorrect. The correct publication year for this article is 2023.]

The present study investigates the effects of online collaborative writing instruction combined with metacognitive guidance on students' writing performance in German as a foreign language and their metacognitive awareness. For this purpose, a total of 90 students are randomly and equally divided into three groups: group with online collaborative writing instruction combined with metacognitive guidance (on-CWI+MG), group with face-to-face collaborative writing instruction combined with metacognitive guidance (f2f-CWI+MG) and group with in-class individual writing activities without metacognitive guidance (i-WRITE). Results revealed that the on-CWI+MG group showed the best writing performance and there was a complex interaction with the f2f-CWI+MG group in terms of metacognitive awareness. Moreover, the two basic levels of metacognitive awareness, knowledge about cognition and regulation of cognition, had a predictive effect on writing performance, with knowledge about cognition having a larger effect. Relevant implications for better understanding online collaborative writing instruction combined with metacognitive guidance are discussed.

The proliferation of large language models represents a paradigm shift in the landscape of automated essay scoring (AES) systems, fundamentally elevating their accuracy and efficacy. This study presents an extensive examination of large language models, with a particular emphasis on the transformative influence of transformer-based models, such as BERT, mBERT, LaBSE, and GPT, in augmenting the accuracy of multilingual AES systems. The exploration of these advancements within the context of the Turkish language serves as a compelling illustration of the potential for harnessing large language models to elevate AES performance in in low-resource linguistic environments. Our study provides valuable insights for the ongoing discourse on the intersection of artificial intelligence and educational assessment.

This study explores youth eco-literacy and its role in addressing the climate crisis, consumption, and socio-political challenges. Eco-literacy involves environmental understanding, skills, and critical perspectives, enabling active engagement and informed decision-making. Through geo-social lenses, I examine how Turkish youth participate politically, both online and offline, in climate change and consumerism dialogues, considering local, global, and planetary perspectives. The analysis focuses on young people's interpretive agency, creatively expressing environmental ideologies and shaping values with a political stance characterized by reflexivity, agency, and commitment to daily activism and eco-friendly lifestyles. Qualitative data collection included discussions on daily environmental practices and essays on environmental citizenship, covering eco-literacy sources, responsible actors, and ecological awareness strategies. Findings illustrate how young participants address opportunities and disparities, utilizing the research environment for collective learning and action. The study further investigates young people's showcase of their eco-literacies and advocacy for a public (eco) pedagogy beyond traditional education.

This study explores the influence of feedback mode on learners' behavioral and affective engagement through a mixed method research design. Fourteen English as a foreign language (EFL) learners at a Turkish university performed four writing tasks (i.e., two essays and two reports) throughout an authentic seven-week distance foreign language (L2) writing course as part of their assessment. All learners were provided with e-written feedback on two of their writing performances (i.e., one essay and one report) and screencast (video) feedback on the other two. Their writing performances were analyzed in terms of behavioral engagement as measured by responsiveness to feedback; and their responses to a questionnaire of nine open-ended questions were analyzed qualitatively and inductively in terms of affective engagement. Results indicated that learners' behavioral engagement did not seem to differ depending on the feedback mode. Furthermore, while learners' affective engagement was higher in screencast feedback condition, several factors were identified in favour of screencast feedback (i.e., perceived cognitive and motivational benefits) and in favour of e-written feedback (i.e., perceived practical benefits).

In this study, prospective Arabic teacher's opinions about the ideal Arabic teacher characteristics were examined. The study was carried out according to the phenomenology study pattern, which is one of the qualitative research methods. The study group of this research, which was carried out in the 2021-2022 academic year, was determined by convenience sampling; The study consisted of 63 freshmen and sophomore teacher candidates, 25 male and 38 female, studying in the Arabic Language Teaching Program of the Faculty of Education at Süleyman Demirel University. Document was used as a data collection tool in the research. Teacher candidates were asked to write an essay about the ideal Arabic teacher. The compositions of the students formed the documents of the research. Interpretation of the data was done by content analysis. The findings of the study showed that pre-service teachers' views on the ideal Arabic teacher were divided into three themes: "Personal Characteristics "Professional Characteristics" and "Field Competence."

One of the aims of educational institutions in Turkey is to adopt an understanding of nationalism based on Atatürk's views by students. Atatürk's understanding of nationalism was founded on the unity of culture. It rejects racism. It emphasizes cultural unity rather than blood ties or religious unity. However, various forms of nationalism in Turkey can find supporters. For this reason, it is important to examine how secondary school students understand nationalism and with which concepts they explain it. Qualitative research method was used in this research, which aims to examine how students conceptualize and understand nationalism. Since it is important for the students to express themselves naturally, they were asked to write an essay on nationalism. Student writings were analyzed by content analysis. According to the results obtained within the scope of the study, the students mostly used the expressions "to love homeland and nation" and "to protect homeland and nation" when explaining the concept of nationalism. As the age and grade levels of the students increase, the number of concepts related to nationalism used by students increases. Nationalism is understood differently by male and female students. While female students emphasize the concepts of love and work, male students emphasize the concepts of protecting and independence. Considering the place where the students live, the meaning attributed to the concept of nationalism varies. While the students living in the city center used the concept of love more, the students living in the town focused on the concept of protecting. The most important finding obtained within the scope of the study is that the participants did not base their nationalism on blood ties or religious unity. Students did not use non-inclusive expressions while describing nationalism. For this reason, it was understood that the participants had thoughts compatible with Atatürk's understanding of nationalism.

The present study aims to reveal the use of high-frequency verbs "make" and "do" when they occur in a verb+noun combination in the argumentative essays of Turkish learners of English. In this context, the present study investigated the grammatical and semantic patterns and erroneous productions in the learner corpus. The investigation made use of a learner corpus and LOCNESS as the reference native corpus for comparison purposes. The findings showed that there were some similarities and dissimilarities among two corpora in terms of grammatical and semantic properties. Based on the findings of the current study and previous studies, the present study shared theoretical and practical implications particularly for language teaching settings.

This study explores how syntactic complexity and lexical complexity vary in argumentative essays written by L2 learners of English at B2 and C1 CEFR proficiency levels. We approach both syntactic complexity and lexical complexity from a multi-dimensional perspective, examining syntactic complexity at different levels (i.e., global, clausal, and phrasal) and including the three lexical dimensions as diversity, density, and sophistication. Undergraduate students (n=42) studying English Language Teaching at a private university in Turkey voluntarily participated in this study and completed an argumentative essay writing task. We manually coded their essays for syntactic complexity structures and used the automated analyzer developed by Lu (2012) for lexical complexity features. We calculated descriptive statistics separately for the lower-level and higher-level groups and investigated the syntactic complexity variation among the two groups using the nonparametric Mann-Whitney U test. Our results indicated significant variation among the two proficiency levels in three syntactic structures (finite complement clauses controlled by nouns, words before the main verb, and passives), while there was no significant difference between the groups in lexical complexity. These findings contribute to the understanding of the connection between linguistic features and L2 writing proficiency levels.

Metadiscourse is a tool for writers to guide and interact with readers through texts. Yet in most student texts, one of the points lacking is the interaction between writers and readers. In this study, frequency and type of interactive and interactional metadiscourse features were explored via students' research-based essays based on Hyland's metadiscourse taxonomy. Additionally, the students' English Vocabulary Profile (EVP), lexical diversity, lexical density, and readability features of the texts in the corpus were scrutinized, which serve as an indicator of writing quality. Finally, the relationship of metadiscourse use with students' writing performance, lexical diversity, lexical density, and readability was explored through statistical measures. Findings show that following explicit metadiscourse instruction, students' research-based essays included more interactive metadiscourse than interactional metadiscourse, indicating that the students were dealing with more textual features, such as coherence, than interactional metadiscourse. Apart from findings regarding EVP such as lexical diversity, lexical density, and readability features, a positive relationship was explored between metadiscourse use and writing performance, lexical components, and textual features. It is concluded that metadiscourse should be integrated into the writing syllabus since it has a positive relationship with students' use of academic vocabulary in their essays.

This study investigated lexical complexity in English language teaching (ELT) students' essays across genres and over the course of time. The essays included descriptive, compare and contrast, advantage and disadvantage, and argumentative genres. Employing a longitudinal, quasi-experimental and repeated measures design in a year-long writing course in the ELT department of a northeastern Turkish university, we analyzed lexical density, lexical sophistication and lexical variation in a corpus of 229 essays via the web-based lexical complexity analyzer developed by Ai and Lu (2010). The scores of all measures were analyzed using SPSS for further examination through descriptive and inferential statistics. Of the three indices, only the lexical density index was found to have a significant difference across genres, with the highest score in the descriptive essay. The findings related to lexical complexity development over time revealed that a statistically significant change was only captured in the lexical variation index. These findings might contribute to the language acquisition research as our study encompasses the examination of all three lexical complexity indices across four different genres and over time. In this vein, some considerable implications for future writing research and for writing instruction in foreign/second language education are suggested.

In the study, the effect of hierarchical vocabulary activities prepared in accordance with Gass's Second Language Acquisition Model developed by Ates (2016) on students' written expression skills and writing anxiety was investigated. While the determined target words were taught to the experimental group with hierarchical vocabulary activities, the supervised group was kept in a regular diary. The method of the study consists of an experimental design with pre-test-post-test-measurement and supervised group. Experimental and supervised groups consisted of foreign students studying at Inonu-TÖMER in the 2017-2018 academic year. An essay was written to the students as a pre-test and a post-test, and the Writing Anxiety Scale was applied. No significant difference was found between the experimental and supervised groups of the Written Expression Rubric, which is used to score the compositions, in the pre-test and post-tests. It was concluded that the privatized instruction applied to both groups was beneficial for students' written expressions. There was a significant difference between the experimental and supervised groups in terms of Writing Anxiety Scale pre-test scores. It was determined that the writing anxiety of the experimental group was higher in the pre-test.

This study was conducted to determine the writing skills of bilingual students whose mother tongue is Kurdish and monoligual students whose mother tongue is Turkish in the fifth grade of secondary school. More specifically, the story and essay writing skills of bilingual students are compared with the writing skills of monolingual students based on their reading habits and their parents' educational backgrounds. The research is a descriptive study based on scanning model and aims to reveal the current situation as it is. The study group of the research consists of a total of 104 fifth grade secondary school students, 52 bilingual and 52 monolingual, studying in 4 different secondary schools in the central district of Ipekyolu in Van, Turkey. In order to determine students' writing skills, stories and essays were written to them at different times in one lesson hour (average forty minutes). The stories were evaluated according to the Story Writing Evaluation Form (Izdes, 2011). The essays were evaluated according to the Written Expression Rating Scale (Deniz, 2003). According to the results of Mann Whitney-U and Kruskal-Wallis-H tests, monolingual students outperformed bilingual students in both story and essay writing. While a significant difference was found between bilingual and monolingual students' essay and story writing skills, no significant difference was found in terms of parents› education status or the number of books their parents read. The findings have interesting implications for the researchers and teachers in the area.

The major purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of flipped classroom on pre-service English teachers' Advanced Writing achievement. The study also aims at exploring whether flipped classroom approach makes a difference, if any, on the self-regulated learning of the participants. The participants of this study were selected by convenience sampling method and consisted of fifty-five (N=55) pre-service ELT teachers attending Advanced Writing course and studying at English Language Teaching Department (ELT) at a foundation university in the fall semester of 2017-2018 academic year. Two intact classes were selected as control (N=28) and experimental group (N=27). The control group was exposed to traditional lecture based instruction, whereas the experimental group received the flipped classroom approach. In this quasi-experimental study, data were gathered through pre-post-tests of advanced writing and self-regulated learning scale. Mixed ANOVA analysis was used for data analysis. The obtained results demonstrated that the implementation of flipped classroom approach resulted in better writing achievement, yet self-regulated learning showed no significant difference between groups. Based on these findings, the study provides pedagogical implications and suggestions for integrating flipped classroom approach in the undergraduate programs.

This study investigated the effectiveness of using corpus as a data-driven learning (DDL) tool to enhance the academic writing skills of Turkish EFL learners. The study also explored learners' views of the potential use of corpus in L2 academic writing. To achieve these objectives, a mixed-method sequential explanatory design was employed, involving freshman student teachers enrolled in the Department of English Language Teaching at a state university in Turkey. The participants completed four argumentative essay writing tasks. Two tasks employed conventional techniques for error correction, while the other two utilized corpus as a reference tool for error correction. The latter two tasks were complemented by corpus training for the participants. The results indicated that using corpus as a DDL tool had a significant impact on the academic writing skills of Turkish EFL learners, with notable improvements observed in both grammar and vocabulary use. Participants also expressed positive feedback on the use of corpus as a DDL tool in enhancing their L2 academic writing.

It has been observed that Turkish university students suffer in L2 writing when they lack background knowledge about the writing topic. Triggered by this observation, this study intended to explore effectiveness of content-schemata activation for scaffolding Turkish students in their challenging L2 writing practices. Study participants, students studying at an English-medium university in Turkey, were asked to write an essay on a specific topic at the beginning of the week before participating in any activities and then they were asked to write a second essay on the same topic after being engaged in various skills activities designed to activate their content-schemata. The same procedure was repeated for seven weeks with a different topic each week. To gather data, students' first and second essays were compared and students' and teachers' perceptions regarding their experiences in English writing classes were elicited through questionnaires. As study findings reveal that content-schemata activation leads to the production of better essays in terms of content and that both students and teachers are positive about the use of skills activities for idea generation prior to essay writing, integration of activities that would activate students' content-schemata into the language curriculum in other ESL/EFL educational contexts is highly recommended.

This quasi-experimental study, using a pretest-treatment-posttest-delayed posttest design, investigated the effects of two comprehensive corrective feedback strategies: direct corrective feedback (DCF), and metalinguistic explanation (ME) on L2 learners' written syntactic accuracy. The participants were 90 Turkish EFL learners. After ensuring their homogeneity in terms of L2 proficiency using Oxford Quick Placement Test, they were assigned to three groups: DCF, ME, and No Feedback (NF). The treatment/control period lasted for five weeks, during which the experimental groups wrote an argumentative essay in class, received the unfocused feedback, and revised their corrected text. The participants in the NF group were provided with feedback only on content, orthography, and organization, but not on grammatical errors. Results of the posttests and delayed-posttests (after a two-week interval) revealed that both experimental groups significantly outperformed the NF group; however, no statistically significant difference was found between the DCF and ME groups. Pedagogical implications are discussed in the paper.

Communication has always been a basic need for human beings throughout the history. The Internet, which became widespread in the late 20th century, provided new and improved opportunities in communication. Social media, one of these communication opportunities, has become an indispensable means of communication. The aim of the current research is to determine which social media accounts the middle school students use and why they use social media. The sampling of the study is comprised of 211 students attending a state middle school in Turkey. In the current study, the participating students were asked to write an authentic composition with the title "use of social media" and the collected data in this way were analyzed by using the content analysis method. According to the results obtained in the current study, it can be argued that the participating children are aware of the negative effects of the use of social media on their social life, academic achievement and health. However, despite these negative effects, they find it difficult to keep themselves away from social media. According to the participating students, social media is a harmful communication tool that makes it easy to get information and news, is entertaining, addictive and not suitable for children.

While there is general agreement among learners, teachers, and scholars that constructive feedback on writing is necessary to revision, there are fewer consensuses on how feedback should be given, when, by whom, and what sort of feedback is most effective (Weigle, 2014). Providing feedback on writing is generally categorized into three types: written comments, individual conferences, and recorded oral feedback. As the first two types are believed to be very time-consuming and lots of workloads, recording comments, along with the advances in technology over the last decades, has opened new possibilities for feedback in the form of podcasts or other digitally recorded means. In this study, the effect of recorded oral feedback to the writing of the English as a foreign language (EFL) learners was taken into scrutiny. In so doing, two different types of feedback (i.e., audio-recorded comments and metalinguistic written corrective feedback) were given to the learner writing in two groups respectively. The treatment lasted for approximately two months, in which the participants received two different types of feedback to their writing (e.g., recorded oral feedback and metalinguistic written corrective feedback). Results indicated that the group receiving audio-recorded comments on their writing outperformed the latter in their content, and organization, while no significant difference was observed between the two groups in clarity and sentence-level accuracy.

This study aims to investigate the effect of 5E Learning Model-based Essay Writing course design and implementation on the achievement level of 12th grade high school students in Essay Writing Course. The teaching and development of writing skills in foreign language education is very important, but it is a known fact that our foreign language education presents problems even in the level of middle and higher education in the foreign language education system. In this respect, the development of writing skills and the improvement of the lessons are very important. The study is a case study with mixed method in which both qualitative and quantitative data collection procedures and instruments such as achievement tests, peer feedback form, students' progress check form, and teacher performance observation form are employed together. In the present study, qualitative data, collected by means of peer evaluation, student progress check and teacher performance observation, is subjected to descriptive analysis whereas quantitative data, collected by means of Essay Writing achievement tests which are applied to twenty-two 12th grade students before and after the instruction and implementation of 5E Learning Model-based Essay Writing Course as pre- and post-test, is analyzed by paired sample t-test. According to the results of the analysis, it can be said that the implementation of 5E Learning Model-based Essay Writing course has a positive effect on the achievement level of students in Essay Writing Course.

This action research study was conducted to improve the skills of writing a thought paragraph in 7th grade students. The study was planned for a 14-week period and a total of 25 activities were implemented with students during the study. Interviews held with Turkish teachers, journals kept by the researcher and the students in relation to the study contributed to the course of the research. At the end of the study, it was observed that the students had a preconception against writing before starting the action research study. According to the findings of the study, it is understood that the students did not receive a paragraph-only education, and that the paragraph types are briefly addressed in Turkish courses. This may have led students to have prejudice about writing and paragraph type. Students have undergone a process-based activity implementation that moves from word to sentence, and from sentence to paragraph. The activities applied to students during the action research study were created to achieve inductive and deductive learning, completing a piece, gaining the skills of comprehensive and critical thinking about an event or a subject. It was seen in the students' journal entries and written essays that the skills of thought paragraph writing gradually improved. This action research study revealed that if students are provided with comprehensive thought paragraph writing training, they would be able to write thought paragraphs at the desired level. It is thought that if students are given more comprehensive training on paragraph types, students' problems with their ability to write would be reduced.

The current study presents the findings of a pre-test/post-test design to explore the efficacy of a genre-based approach to teaching argumentative essay writing during synchronous classes. The study is conducted with the participation of a group of freshman and junior year student teachers of English Language Teaching enrolled at the course of Writing Skills-II. Forty-five student teachers' argumentative essays on the same topic they wrote before and after the instruction were analyzed. The study focuses on four steps of the teaching-learning cycle of a genre-based approach suggested by Hyland (2007). During eight weeks, setting the context, modeling, joint construction, and individual construction were adapted and developed with the participants. The researchers evaluated the student teachers' essays via the "Rubric for the Assessment of the Argumentative Essay", which centers on introduction, main points conclusion, and mechanics. After the grading completed by the researchers, the interrater reliability analysis was conducted. The overall score and scores on each component of the pre- and post-instruction were compared via Paired sample t-test. The findings showed that the genre-based instruction provided positive results in terms of improving student teachers' argumentative essay writing in synchronous classes.

This cross-sectional survey study investigates students' perceptions of the effectiveness of Turnitin in detecting plagiarism in academic presentation slides. The data was collected online from 311 students studying at a prominent English-medium instruction university in Turkey. The findings indicated that more than half of them believed in the effectiveness of Turnitin in detecting plagiarism in presentations. Students perceived themselves as academically honest when preparing their presentations. Also, they were aware of the importance of using Turnitin in a required presentation skills course to detect plagiarism. This research can add to the literature since, unlike research on the use of detecting plagiarism in writing, the literature on the use of Turnitin in presentations is not rich and diverse.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the utilization of textbook adaptation strategies by novice and experienced EFL instructors working in a language preparatory program at a foundation (non-profit, private) university in Turkey. Specifically, the study investigated the self-reported beliefs of the two groups of instructors about textbook adaptation and explored which adaptation strategies were most frequently implemented in their classroom. The study also attempted to compare whether there were differences between the two groups of instructors related to their use of adaptation strategies in their courses and find out the reasons behind their adaptive decisions. The participants were 14 Turkish EFL instructors (7 novices and 7 experienced) offering English courses in an intermediate level English classroom. Data were collected from reflective essays, lesson plans, and semi-structured interviews. The findings revealed that both groups of instructors shared highly positive beliefs about the implementation of adaptation strategies in their courses apart from some differences related to types of strategies and their frequencies. Besides, the adaptive decisions of the participating instructors were closely related to their students, tasks, context, time, and their own beliefs. Based on the obtained findings, the researchers provided some pedagogical implications and suggestions regarding the effective use of textbook adaptation strategies in language preparatory programs.

The connective 'but' mainly represents two different contrastive relations (Lakoff, 1971; Van Dijk, 1979; Blakemore, 1989). One of them is semantic, which shows semantic opposition and where no expectation is denied. The other is pragmatic, which shows a denial of expectation. This study aimed to investigate the use of 'but' by Turkish EFL students in their L2 writings in terms of the relations it indicated. The participants of the study were the first-year students in the Department of English Language and Literature in Hatay Mustafa Kemal University in Turkey. Students' argumentative essays written in the Research and Study Techniques course were used for the study. Each instance of 'but' was coded based on the relation it indicated, and then those relations were separated into categories depending on their meaning in the context. The findings showed that the number of pragmatic uses was higher than semantic uses in the students' L2 writings and that the pragmatic uses could be categorized as violated expectation, correction, evidence, and emphasizing condition. The study revealed that L1 transfer, frequency in the L2 input, context, position of the connective 'but' in the sentence, and the type of the essay were related to the use of semantic or pragmatic contrast. The study also revealed that the unmarked function of 'but' could be violated expectations.

When providing feedback, teachers are concerned not only with the simple transmission of information, but also with motivational and interpersonal dynamics. To mitigate these concerns, teachers may inflate feedback by reducing negative or increasing positive content. The resulting difference between initial judgments and feedback may be even more drastic for ethnic minority students: In non-communicated judgments, negative stereotypes may result in more negative judgments, whereas in feedback, concerns about being or appearing prejudiced may inflate feedback towards ethnic minority students. These hypotheses were tested in a sample of 132 German teacher students in a 2 (between subjects: feedback vs. non-communicated judgment) × 2 (within subjects: target student's migration background: Turkish vs. none) design in which participants read supposed student essays and provided their written impressions to the research team or the supposed student. Findings revealed that teacher students' feedback was more positive than their non-communicated judgments on a multitude of dimensions. Contrary to expectations, these effects were not stronger when the student had a Turkish migration background. Instead, teacher students rated the essay of the student with a Turkish migration background more favorably both in the judgment and feedback conditions. Our results suggest that teachers adapt their initial judgments when giving feedback to account for interpersonal or motivational dynamics. Moreover, ethnic minority students may be especially likely to receive overly positive feedback. While the motivational/interpersonal dynamics may warrant some inflation in feedback, negative consequences of overly positive feedback, for which ethnic minority students may be especially vulnerable, are discussed.

Metadiscourse is essential in establishing pragmatically effective academic written communication. However, little is known about how metadiscourse is used in written texts produced by tertiary level second language learners. This corpus-based linguistic research study aims to explore the frequencies and usages of metadiscourse markers in student essays written by Turkish learners of English and investigate the divergences from native speaker norms. As reference corpora, British Academic Written English (BAWE) and British National Corpus (BNC) were used. We found that in academic discourse, regardless of experience in writing (novice or expert) and L1 language background, interpersonal metadiscourse markers are used more frequently than textual metadiscourse markers. The commonalities between novice non-native and expert native writers together with differences between two native speaker groups suggest that pragmatic competence, particularly metadiscourse use, develops by experience regardless of L1 background.

This study focuses on the systematic avoidance of difficult expressions by learners of English to achieve error-free production. It is an attempt to reveal why this strategy is being so widely used and its negative effects on the overall L2 development. The frequency of relative clauses used by thirty-six B2 level undergraduate students in their graded essays was analyzed and compared with the frequency of relative clauses in their ungraded essays and in sample essays provided by essay-writing websites on the internet. Finally, a comprehensive grammar test on relative clauses was given to students to see how well they know relative clauses. The findings of the study were compared with the findings of earlier studies of other researchers on avoidance, and the contribution of error correction and evaluation system in English courses to the emergence of avoidance behavior was displayed.

The present paper, which is a study based on midterm exam results of 53 University English prep-school students, examines correlation between a direct writing test, measured holistically by multiple-trait scoring, and two indirect writing tests used in a competence exam, one of which is a multiple-choice cloze test and the other a rewrite test measured on the sentence grammar scale. The purpose of the study is to compare and analyse the results obtained from the use of these distinct strategies in writing assessment and to see to what extent they are of value to account for the students' writing skills and in what areas they can offer validity and reliability in diagnostic terms as well as investigating whether any quantitative correlations exist between the choice of topics and the level of achievement in essay-writing, in which the choice of topic also implied the choice of a particular rhetoric to be used as part of the essay writing task.

The aim of this study is to view how argumentative text pattern teaching influences constituting argumentative essay elements. The study was performed according to one-group pre-test post-test design. The study was carried out in spring term of 2017-2018 academic year and it lasted for five weeks. 33 prospective teachers who took the course of Text Producing Techniques participated in the study. The data of study were collected through 132 argumentative essays which prospective teachers wrote and Argumentative Text Elements Rubric to evaluate these. The results of the research are as follows: Quite few students included argumentative essay elements before argumentative essay pattern teaching and none of the students wrote justification for counter argument. It was determined that 66.7% of the students didn't write data, 81.8% of them didn't write counter argument, 87.9% did not write justification for counter argument, 84.8% did not write rebuttal of counter argument and 48.5% did not write conclusion. At the third study, number of successful students increased on the basis of all elements. However, the majority of students have reached a partially successful level. At the post test, most of the students achieved successful level on the basis of all elements except refuting counter argument. Significant differences on behalf of the post-test were determined between pre-test and post-test scores at all of the argumentative essay elements.

Making errors is a natural process of language learning. As in all kind of learning, language learning also involves making errors. Research has shown that even in the first language acquisition process, children make countless errors. Similarly, adult learners of English will inevitably make errors until they have mastered the rules of target language. In this respect, this study was conducted to examine written grammatical errors of 2nd year Turkish students majoring in English Language Teaching at Anadolu University. First, related literature has been reviewed in the study. Both descriptive and qualitative research design has been used in order to collect data to be analyzed. The students were asked to write a narrative essay about a video they had watched. All the essays were analyzed one by one to identify all the grammatical errors of the students by three inter-raters. The raters identified grammatical errors manually and reached on a consensus in the categorization process. The only concern of the study was to analyze grammatical errors; this is why, ICLE/ Louvain Taxonomy of Errors (Diaz-Negrillo& Fernandez-Dominguez, 2006) was used partly in the categorization of the errors. The study reported that preposition errors were the most common grammatical errors among Turkish learners of English followed by respectively verb errors, article errors, word class errors, pronoun errors and others. In the light of previous literature, the findings indicate that interference effect and developmental process might have been the reason for the grammatical errors.

The aim of this study is to reveal the subject trends of university students according to species. This is a qualitative study based on document review. The data of the study was obtained from 67 volunteering in-service Turkish teachers' worksheets. The worksheets were classified according to text types. Text types were determined based on the opinions of three experts in the field. Text types were classified in the following order: 1. Story, 2. poem, 3. memoir, 4. biography, 5. travel and 6. essay. The study group comprised of 67 volunteering third grade pre-service teachers studying at Turkish Education. The teacher candidate was used to mean a student who is studying at the faculty of education. Students were coded 1F (female student in the first place), 2M (male student in the second place). Students wrote essay every two weeks for a period of 12 weeks. Students were given an average of forty minutes for each text type. Each student was coded and subjects written were classified based on main themes. Three copies of subjects were made and given to three scholars. The papers were evaluated in terms of subjects and subjects were evaluated in terms of frequency. Next, content analysis was performed for codes and themes. As a result, it was discovered that pre-service teachers chose to change subject based on the type of texts and it was shown that it was effective in the variation of subjects.

Using generalizability (G-) theory and rater interviews as both quantitative and qualitative approaches, this study examined the impact of scoring methods (i.e., holistic versus analytic scoring) on the scoring variability and reliability of an EFL institutional writing assessment at a Turkish university. Ten raters were invited to rate 36 undergraduate argumentative essays first holistically and then analytically, with a three-week time interval. The quantitative results indicated that with proper rater training holistic scoring can produce as reliable and dependable assessment outcomes as analytic scoring. Similarly, the qualitative results revealed that all raters prefer using the holistic scoring method because it could help them not only assign fair and objective scores to essays but also facilitate their scoring process. Further, most raters agreed that the content of an essay was the most important factor that most affected their holistic scoring decision making of an essay. In contrast, all aspects of an essay (e.g., grammar, content, or organization) jointly affected their analytic scoring decision making of an essay. Important implications for EFL writing assessment professionals in the institutional assessment context are discussed.

The present study aims to explore Turkish EFL students' major writing difficulties by analyzing the frequent writing errors in academic essays. Accordingly, the study examined errors in a corpus of 150 academic essays written by Turkish EFL students studying at the Department of English Language and Literature at a public university in Turkey. The essays were written on assigned topics as take home exam papers or assignments in the context of a first year academic writing course. The corpus consisted of essays of various lengths ranging from 500 word essays to 1500 word essays. The essays were compiled into a corpus and analyzed by using a concordance program. The essays were also checked for plagiarism using the online plagiarism detection software and plagiarized essays were excluded from the analysis. Errors were classified by using an error classification system which was organized according to lexico-grammatical categories. The resulting categories consisted of mostly syntactic and lexical categories of error but academic style errors were considered as well. As a result of the analysis, in terms of error categories, the most frequent errors were observed in the verb related error categories. When considered individually, the most frequent errors were observed in noun modification and were mostly interference related.

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 beneficial in accordance with the Zone of Proximal Development; hence both peer feedback and self-monitoring could be integrated with digital platforms in language classrooms. This quasi-experimental research study aimed to investigate the impact of exchanging self and anonymous peer feedback on writing assignments in a digital environment among Turkish EFL high school learners. Data were collected both quantitatively and qualitatively by means of open-ended questions and writing task scores using an analytic scoring rubric. Forty-six students in two intact classes exchanged both self and anonymous peer feedback through four writing assignments submitted via Edmodo as the digital environment. Participants were categorized as good, moderate and weak in each group and each student exchanged self and peer feedback on four written assignments in reverse order. Findings revealed that both self and peer feedback contribute positively to the revision of papers by student authors as they scored significantly better in the revised versions. Their writing scores indicated improvement in five major components: organization, content, grammar, vocabulary, and format. The participants also reported improvements related to content, grammar and format and indicated a positive attitude towards digital self and peer feedback. Since both digital self and peer feedback were found to be beneficial, EFL teachers should be encouraged to implement them in their writing classes.

Based on Robinson's Triadic Componential Framework and the definition of task planning by Ellis (2005), this study was carried out to find out the effects of task planning and rhetorical mode on lexical and syntactic complexity, and overall writing quality of writing production of EFL learners. Following a repeated-measures design, the present study involved 41 ELT students who learned English as a foreign language. In this study, two rhetorical modes were used and for both rhetorical modes, two writing tasks were performed. Whereas one of the tasks was carried out under strategic pre-task planning in which students had extra time and opportunity to make a plan, the other task was performed under unpressured on-line planning in which they had no time pressure or no extra special time for planning. Thus, each participant produced 4 essays, and a total of 164 essays were obtained. Each written text was separately analyzed by automated analysis tools for lexical and syntactic complexity, and also assessed through an analytic rubric for general writing achievement. The results revealed that while all the three dimensions in this study showed significant difference according to the rhetorical mode of writing, task planning had varying effects on each component.

Adverbs require a great deal of effort to be mastered, and even the most advanced users of that language have difficulty in using them correctly (Narita & Sugiura, 2006; Peacock, 2010; Lei, 2012; Leedham & Cai, 2013). The purpose of this study is to find out to what extent relatively high proficiency level EFL learners use different types of adverbs in their argumentative essays. For this purpose, a group of students who have previously taken an academic writing course are selected. To collect the data, a guided writing activity is applied in the target language. The data is analyzed quantitatively by taking the frequency of adverb use. The results show that EFL learners tend to use degree adverbs more than any other semantic category of adverbs. They also tend to overuse adverbs in their academic writing and use adverbs that are not appropriate in the academic prose. It is implied that there is a need for systematic explicit instruction of L2 adverbs and for raising learners' awareness in the meanings and functions of adverbs in L2 writing.

The purpose of this study was to develop a Chorus Motivation Scale (CMS) that is tested in terms of reliability and construct validity by determining the student perceptions of effective motivation strategies in Chorus training in Turkish Music Teacher Training Model. In order to develop a Chorus Motivation Scale, Questionnaire-Effective Motivation Strategies in Chorus Training was applied to second-year, third-year, and fourth-year students who study at Music Teacher Training departments of nine different state universities from seven geographical regions in Turkey (N = 794). Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) were conducted in accordance with new/initial scale development procedures. Analysis of the data reveals a good structure model comprising reliable factors. Confirmatory factor analyses indicated that a model including factors representing the dimensions Leadership, director/student attention, achievement and anxiety was the best fit. The four-factor model yielded RMSEA and SRMR values (=0.05) demonstrating an excellent fit and CFI value with an adequate fit to the data. Cronbach's alpha and initial-final reliability results indicated good to excellent consistency across all CMS subscales, with coefficients ranging from 0.64 to 0.90.

The aim of this paper is to examine the role of composing process and knowledge about coherence/cohesion in French foreign language writing skill. Research sample consists of 35 Turkish students studying French language teaching at a Turkish university. The participants were first given a test containing of three parts in order to determine their level of knowledge about the rules of coherence-cohesion; then, they were asked to write an argumentative essay to see how good they were at writing. Right after the completion of essays, students were administered a 29-item questionnaire concerning the use of composing process. Findings have revealed the following conclusions: 1-Turkish FFL students who know the rules of coherence/cohesion have better writing skills; 2-The participants with better writing skills are those who can employ the composing process; 3-Knowing only the rules of coherence/cohesion or only employing the composing process is not enough to have advanced writing skills in French: both are necessary to be successful. According to the results, it is possible to suggest that rules of coherence/cohesion and composing process be incorporated into the syllabus of writing course and writing course be heavily based on these two topics. Teachers should explicitly teach the process and rules.

The extent and reach of commercial cheating opportunities is ever present; thousands of websites promote differing business models offering assignments in multiple languages and currencies. In addition to commercial companies, students are known to outsource their assignments from friends and family. Assignment outsourcing and contract cheating are not a new problem, yet research to-date has been conducted utilising different survey tools and in different locations, thereby alluding accurate comparisons. This paper reports on a large international research project which utilised the same survey tool across multiple countries. Respondents most commonly reported outsourcing assignments from friends and family, and peer-sharing sites, as compared to essay mills. Large differences were found in the self-reported outsourcing behaviours between countries. Due to the differing outsourcing methods used, a new definition is offered for these behaviours: assignment outsourcing.

This study aimed to find out the impact of "text mining and imitating" strategies on lexical richness, lexical diversity and general success of students in their compositions in second language writing. The participants were 98 students studying their first year in Karadeniz Technical University in English Language and Literature department. Participants in the experimental group were instructed on how to use mining and imitating strategies in their essays to be more competent in vocabulary choice while writing. On the other hand, students in the control group were only instructed on how to write their essays following lesson plans. After treatment, participants in the both group were asked to write two essays. A corpus of 15826 (control group) and a corpus of 25027 (experimental group) words were compiled in two months, and these essays were tagged using a computerized tagging system (Biber 1993). Though there is statistically slight difference in terms of lexical richness, the study revealed that compositions in the experimental group are lexically richer than those in the control group. Common nouns and general verbs subclasses were found to be used more in compositions of the experimental group. In addition to that, students in the experimental group received significantly higher grades than those in the control group.

This study aims to determine how the history teaching career is perceived by prospective history teachers who attended the pedagogical formation program in Adiyaman University in 2014-2015 academic year. The study was conducted through content analysis of 5 sets of essays dealing with various aspects of history teaching. The essays topics were chosen being inspired from the History Teacher's Special Field Competencies identified by Ministry of Education published in 2011. The participants of the study were 11 female and 13 male prospective history teachers who did not have teaching experience except for the teaching practice in pedagogical formation program. Each participant submitted 5 essays, each with a different topic. The topics were accepted as the main themes. Analysis did not reveal a consistency between their objectives in teaching history, their teaching and testing methods. In the light of the results, some suggestions were made on history teaching as second career, history teaching practices at universities and testing methods at secondary and high schools.

Breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge have been studied from many different perspectives, but the related literature lacks serious studies dealing with their effects on vocabulary profiles of EFL learners. In this paper, with an aim to fill this gap, the relative effects of breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge on L2 vocabulary profiles were analysed. In the first stage of the study, learner essays (n = 84) and native essays (n = 75) were compared in terms of vocabulary profiles through the use of an online database, and each participant obtained vocabulary profile scores from four different levels. In the next stage, the learners' depth and breadth of vocabulary knowledge were measured by using two different vocabulary tests, and then the scores they obtained on these tests were hierarchically regressed on their profile scores. The results suggested that both breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge had significant and robust effects on the L2 vocabulary profiles of the EFL learners; however, depth of vocabulary knowledge appeared to be a better predictor of vocabulary profiles than breadth of vocabulary knowledge.

The literature on the topical organization of essays suggests that there are four possible types of progression from the topic of one clause to the topics of the following clauses. These are parallel, sequential, extended parallel, and extended sequential progressions. Essay writers' ability to create cohesion and coherence can be evaluated on the extent of their capability to use topical progression appropriately and adequately. In other words, essays in which topical structuring is properly accomplished are more cohesive and coherent. Based on this fact, this study aims to analyze the topical structure in argumentative essays written by Turkish learners of EFL. Our objectives in doing this are (1) to assess Turkish EFL learners' ability to construct topical links between clauses, (2) to identify the type of progression mostly preferred by them, and (3) to find out the range of linguistic structures that they use to create progression. To this end, the researchers have conducted Topical Structure Analysis (TSA) on essays produced by 81 ELT students from three different universities in Turkey (Gaziantep, Inönü, and Hakkari). The analysis illustrated the fact that Turkish EFL learners are not as skilled as they should be in topical structuring. It also revealed that they usually prefer to use parallel and sequential types of progression, while extended progression has been observed to be less common in their essays. Finally, we found that the participants of the study mostly use pronouns for parallel progression, whereas they switch to new noun phrases for sequential progression.

The purpose of this study is to present students' experiences, interest in engineering, and personal narratives while participating in a robotics summer camp in a metropolitan city in Turkey. In this study, I used qualitative data collection methods such as interviews, field notes, and observations. I used the four principles of Engle and Conant as a framework for analyzing their interactions and tasks as well as to make sense of their mutual interactions, tasks, and social structure in the robotics summer camp. The study findings indicated that the robotics summer camp was different from regular science classrooms in terms of goals, practical work, and social structure. The robotics summer camp provided students with the opportunity to engage in robotics activities and have personal interactions with engineering researchers about engineering and their future career plans. The robot design experience and close relationships with engineering professionals at the camp were sources that nurtured and maintained student interest in engineering. I concluded that the robotics summer camp was a venue for students to gain first-hand experiences, develop and sustain interest in engineering, and comprehend the nature of engineering in general. This in turn helped students to determine their career choice and sustain a lifelong interest in engineering.

Embracing a lot of functions, metadiscourse markers are among the most significant factors which affect L2 writing quality. In the present study, whether explicit teaching of metadiscourse markers has any effect on EFL students' writing proficiency was investigated. The participants (N: 21) of the study included freshman students majoring in teaching English as a foreign language at a state university in Turkey. One group quasi experimental design was employed in the study. A process-genre based writing course syllabus, in which meta-discourse markers were taught explicitly was designed and implemented. Before the training, participants were asked to write an argumentative essay as pre-test. After the training, students were asked to write another argumentative essay about a different topic which was considered as post-test. In order to find out whether there was any difference between students former and later performances SPSS, a quantitative analysis method, was employed. Firstly, frequencies of metadiscourse markers used by the participants in their pre-test/post-test essays were calculated. Then, students' pre-test/post-test performances were compared. Findings of the study revealed that students made considerable progress in improving their writing as a skill especially in terms of achieving organization in their essays.

This study examines the decision-making behaviors of raters with varying levels of experience while assessing EFL essays of distinct qualities. The data were collected from 28 raters with varying levels of rating experience and working at the English language departments of different universities in Turkey. Using a 10-point analytic rubric, each rater voice-recorded their thoughts through think-aloud protocols (TAPs) while scoring 16 essays of distinct text qualities and provided brief score explanations. Data collected from TAPs were analyzed by using a coding scheme adapted from Cumming, Kantor, and Powers (2002). The results revealed that text quality has a larger effect than rating experience on raters' decision-making behaviors. In addition, raters prioritized aspects of style, grammar, and mechanics when rating low-quality essays, but emphasized rhetoric and their general impressions of the text for high-quality essays. Furthermore, low-experienced raters differed more in their behaviors while assessing scripts of distinct qualities than did the medium- and high-experienced groups. The findings suggest that raters' scoring behaviors might evolve with practice, resulting in less variation in their decisions. As such, this research provides implications for developing strategy-based rater training programs, which might help to increase consistency across raters of different experience levels.

This article examines the results of a 17-week self-narrative portfolio project from a year seven classroom in Turkey. The practitioner research combines the frameworks of Cultural Historical Activity Theory and Figured Words in order to assess the differences in linguistic and identity growth between national and international students. I posit that even in places where concepts of identity are delicate and unchallenged, student autobiographies can create safe classroom spaces through which students can develop agency, linguistic skills, and authentic approaches to learning. By drawing additionally on Bakhtinian concepts of authoring the self alongside the concept of Figured Worlds and the heuristic of CHAT, I was able to explore how confronting one's ethnic identity is central in positioning oneself within a Figured World; metaphors are a way that students can cope with, confront, and overcome their internal conflicts with the Figured Worlds they step into; and moments of realisation occur when students express their conflicts, thus creating their own agency.