---

The purpose of the present study was to develop appropriate scoring scales for each of the defined stages of the writing process, and also to determine to what extent these scoring scales can reliably and validly assess the performances of EFL learners in an academic writing task. Two hundred and two students’ writing samples were collected after a step-by-step process oriented essay writing instruction. Four stages of writing process – generating ideas (brainstorming), outlining (structuring), drafting, and editing – were operationally defined. Each collected writing sample included student writers’ scripts produced in each stage of the writing process. Through a detailed analysis of the collected writing samples by three raters, the features which highlighted the strong or weak points in the student writers’ samples were identified, and then the student writers’ scripts were categorized into four levels of performance. Then, descriptive statements were made for each identified feature to represent the specified level of performance. These descriptive statements, or descriptors, formed rating scales for each stage of the writing process. Finally, four rating sub-scales, namely brainstorming, outlining, drafting, and editing were designed for the corresponding stages of the writing process. Subsequently, the designed rating scales were used by the three raters to rate the 202 collected writing samples. The scores thus obtained were put to statistical analyses. The high inter-rater reliability estimate (0.895) indicated that the rating scales could produce consistent results. The Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) indicated that there was no significant difference among the ratings created by the three raters. Factor analysis suggested that at least three constructs, –language knowledge, planning ability, and idea creation ability – could possibly underlie the variables measured by the rating scale.  

---

This article examines various features of classroom discourse in a communicative EFL classroom. The class was observed and audio-taped during five class sessions with the total recordings of 4 hours of classroom interactions. An analytic framework was developed to examine these features in four major areas of teaching exchanges, characteristics of input, error treatment, and question types. The analysis revealed that the database comprised 52 teaching exchanges, of which 73% contained the F-move with evaluative function, that the teacher modified his speech in accordance with the learners’ language proficiency level, and that there was a clear preference for recasting (51%) and explicit correction (22%), leaving little opportunity for other effective corrective feedback strategies to encourage learner uptake and self-repair. The database was also examined for question types.  Although referential questions are believed to be valuable in promoting communicative interactions, it was found that the teacher asked proportionately more display questions (57%) than referential questions (21%).

---

This study aims at investigating the effect of dynamic assessment (DA) on L2 writing achievement if applied via blogging as a Web 2.0 tool, as well as examining which pattern of interaction is more conducive to learning in such an environment. The results of the study indicate that using weblogs to provide mediation contributes to the enhancement of the overall writing performance, vocabulary and syntactic complexity, and quantity of overall information presented in a single paragraph. That is to say, DA procedures are applicable via Web 2.0 tools and are advantageous to L2 learners’ writing suggesting that L2 practitioners and instructors should actively consider the integration of Web 2.0 technology into L2 education system using DA. Moreover, the collaborative pattern of interaction as compared to expert/novice, dominant/passive, and dominant/dominant patterns is found to be more conducive to fostering writing achievement in the asynchronous computer-mediated communication environment.

---

In order to establish the why of noticing, it is imperative to empirically explore the factors that potentially mediate noticing. This study aimed to explore two factors that are believed to affect noticing:  the complexity of target structures and learners’ second language (L2) proficiency level. English relative clauses (RCs) were selected as the target structures, and Accessibility Hierarchy Hypothesis (AHH) was taken as the measure of the complexity of the RCs. A sample of 113 freshmen English language majors were selected as the participants of the study. A test of English RCs was developed as the placement test, and Key English Test (KET) was used to classify the participants into three groups of High (N=38), Mid (N=37), and Low (N=38) L2 proficiency level. Note-taking was used as the measure of noticing. After administering the RC test and the proficiency test, the participants were given a number of authentic reading texts containing instances of RCs and were required to take notes during reading activity. The non-parametric Friedman’s test demonstrated that the complexity of RCs positively affected the participants’ noticing while the non-parametric ANCOVA indicated that the participants’ L2 proficiency level had no significant effect on noticing. The findings of this study can be helpful to both teachers and material developers in providing learners with optimal conditions for noticing linguistic forms, which in turn, could facilitate L2 learning.