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Both composition teachers and L2 writing teachers have the responsibility of teaching effective academic English writing skills. Although composition teachers and L2 writing teachers may have similar objectives, researchers have shown that these groups of teachers may focus on different writing features and may even have differing views on error gravity when assessing student writing (Brown, 1991; Elder et al., 2003; Rifkin & Roberts, 1995). Common methods for examining these differences include analyzing rater scores and using reflective protocols. Only one study has used eye-tracking methodology to explore the raters’ reading behaviors. The current study expounds on that study to examine whether L2 or composition teachers rate differently. Three L1-like errors and three L2-like errors were identified and introduced into eight paragraphs. Composition and L2 writing teachers assessed the eight paragraphs while an eye-tracker measured their eye-movements. Results indicated that L2 writing teachers assigned overall higher scores to L2 students than composition teachers. Although both composition teachers and L2 teachers may have similar teaching objectives, when rating L2 papers different scores are assigned.

Nouns as nominal premodifiers (NNPs) are an underexplored area of research in L2 academic research writing. In this paper, I cross-investigated NNPs in published qualitative and quantitative research articles written by Filipino research writers (FRWs) in Applied Linguistics (AL), Communication (COM), and Measurement and Evaluation (ME) using Biber et al.’s (2021) noun premodifiers framework, with the aid of Hernandez’s (2021) syntactic patterns. Major results revealed that NNPs dominantly co-occurred across disciplinary RA sub-registers, especially in quantitative ME RAs with the highest frequency of use of noun premodifiers. One-way ANOVA between groups with Post hoc Tukey HSD yielded no significant difference between noun premodifiers across disciplinary RAs. It was concluded that NNPs are widely significant, compressed, and implicit syntactic features of quantitative and qualitative disciplinary RAs. Regardless of disciplines commonly, FRWs use them to maintain economy of expression and compact packaging of information. Noun premodifiers make quantitative and qualitative disciplinary RAs as specialized sub-registers of academic research writing. Implications for research writing curricula, academic research writing instruction, and academic research journals are discussed.

The current qualitative study aimed at fostering critical thinking skills in students and enhancing their analytical capacity, leading them to generate critical academic writing. An open-ended questionnaire dealing with lecturers’ expertise and experiences in teaching writing and the role of their critical thinking skills in writing itself was administered to eight lecturers with expertise in teaching writing. The obtained data were submitted to manual coding, and the findings showed that fostering critical thinking in student writers should follow a stepwise process, whereby they learn to (a) interpret, (b) analyze, (c) synthesize, (d) evaluate, and (e) reflect. It was concluded that problem-based learning is the optimal approach to enhance critical thinking among student writers of academic texts.

The objective of this research is to contribute to applied linguistic theory and to provide insights into the world of workplace telephone conversation. The study examines the structure of telephone call centre dialogues. The interaction entails a wide range of customer service inquiries and problem-solving objectives, in which the Customer Service Representative (CSR) responds to inquiries while attempting to maintain a positive interpersonal interaction with the customer. We chose and evaluated a representative sample of calls having complex negotiation structure or even a communication breakdown. We describe how the conversation progresses and how one response leads to the next in problematic calls with faulty exchange structure (Halliday, 1985, 1994; Ventola, 1987). The data consist of audio recordings of Filipino Customer Service Representatives interacting with English-speaking American customers during commercial customer-service phone calls. 20 representative calls with complex negotiation structure were chosen from approximately 2,000 calls. We used Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), which provides a comprehensive theoretical framework that may be used as an effective analytical tool, to investigate the semantics in terms of logical relations of the exchange structure in the transcripts.

Action research is a promising and significant research methodology that paves the way for intervention, development and change not only within small groups and communities of practice but also within larger societies. Building on a terse-and-informative description of the four major action research theories (Action Science, Cooperative Inquiry, Participatory Action Research, and Living Educational Theory), this paper argues that EFL classes are essentially micro societies where language socialization takes place; it is argued further that the micro society of the EFL classroom can be (a) a ‘garbage in garbage out’ petri dish at the service of the mechanical imparting of linguistic competence to students, (b) a Foucauldian ‘panopticon’ put to ideological use by a despot ruling an oppressed society, or (c) a free milieu aspiring after human development and social change.

The current study aims to explore the differences in disciplinary-socialized (DS) and disciplinary-naïve (DN) students’ writing process conceptions in the two distinct disciplines of humanities and natural sciences. A mixed-method research design was adopted. A writing process questionnaire and a verbal report were used for data collection. 80 graduate and postgraduate students from human sciences and natural sciences were sampled and asked to fill out the questionnaire. 20 of them were also interviewed to obtain their verbal reports. ANCOVA and VPA were conducted to analyze the quantitative and qualitative data respectively. Findings revealed a significant difference in writing process conceptions between students of humanities and natural sciences. It is concluded that DS and DN students differ greatly in terms of their writing conceptions.

The present study aims at exploring the representation of metacultural competence (MC)—a competence that allows negotiation of cultural conceptualizations—in the documents designed at policy and planning stages of ELT curriculum development in Iran. For the policy stage, due to lack of an overt foreign language education policy document, seven major policy documents of Iran (namely, 20-year National Vision, Comprehensive Science Roadmap, Support for Comprehensive Science Roadmap in the Domain of Languages, Cultural Engineering Document, National Curriculum, Fundamental Reform in Education, and Islamicization of Universities) were selected. For the planning stage, Iranian ELT curricula for undergraduate students were chosen. Content analysis of the selected documents revealed that the analyzed documents did not represent MC in detail and mostly attended to the ‘cultural variation awareness’ component and the ‘acknowledge’ and ‘anticipate’ principles, which were limited to negotiating Islamic ideology and disregarded Iranian cultural conceptualizations.

The current study aimed at finding probable differences between native-Persian-speaking (n = 72) and native-English-speaking (n = 72) academic writers’ use of hedging devices in the ‘discussion’ sections of research articles (RAs). 144 RA discussions from Persian-text Iranian academic journals published by Iranian state universities and English-text foreign academic journals published by several famous international academic publishers were randomly selected. The publication dates of the RAs ranged from 2017 to 2022. Using a counter-balanced design, two human coders identified and coded the functions of hedging devices in the corpus according to the theoretical framework proposed by Hyland (1998). Results indicated that Iranian authors of Persian-text RAs systematically use much fewer hedging devices in their discussions than their foreign counterparts. It is argued that this pattern might be due to Iranian RA authors’ (a) personality traits, (b) incompetence in academic writing, or (c) cultural mindset. The paper concludes that professional workshops in which native-Persian-speaking authors are taught to be aware of the importance of hedging devices in academic writing might be necessary and that journal editors should also have an eye on the use of hedging in the process of screening the manuscripts they receive for possible publication in the journals they edit.