Integrating Machine Translation Into EFL Writing Instruction: Process, Product and Perception

Although there is a great demand for machine translation (MT) among language learners, its potentials as a computer-assisted language learning aid remain under-explored. Against this backdrop, this study adopted a mixed research method and conducted a semester-long empirical investigation into how EFL learners in mainland China used MT to assist their writing, whether MT helped improve their writing competence and how they perceived MT in EFL writing instruction. The major findings comprise: 1) By using MT students made more lexical and grammatical changes in essay revision; 2) MT helped improve the learners’ overall writing competence, and particularly had a greater effect on writing accuracy and lexical complexity than on other dimensions; 3) Students generally held a positive attitude towards incorporating MT into EFL writing instruction.

Teaching Writing in Vietnam’s Secondary and High Schools

The current study adopted features of a survey research design to examine the EFL high school teachers’ beliefs about writing and its teaching, their actual classroom practices, and the interplays between their beliefs and practices in the realm of EFL writing instruction. A sample of seventy-six EFL teachers from the eight selected high schools situated in Ho Chi Minh City was recruited for the current survey. The beliefs and practices of EFL writing instruction of these studied teachers were elicited through a thirty-nine-item questionnaire, which was qualitatively analyzed by SPSS 20.0. The study results showed that most of the participants held different views/orientations about writing skills and teaching writing, consisting of form-based, cognitive process-based, functional social-based, and interactive social-based views; nevertheless, the form-based orientation was still most dominant in their beliefs. On the contrary, in practice, most high school teachers followed the product approach, which underlies form-based orientation in lieu of different approaches, explicitly interpreting the writing section’s low results in the Vietnamese National GCSE examination in recent years.

EFL Writing Instruction Research in Morocco: A Historical Overview

This paper is an attempt to trace and discuss how writing instruction research has evolved in the Moroccan EFL context over years. It also seeks to show that most EFL scholars were reactive and not proactive in dealing with this skill; they carried out their studies in response to the composing problems Moroccan EFL learners, at the secondary school or university level, face. The ultimate goal has always been the attainment of a research and evidence-based methodology that would render the writing skill accessible and learnable for most learners. Different writing-related topics have been studied thoroughly. But this paper is limited to the salient issues that Moroccan researchers have placed a premium on such as feedback, methodology, scoring and errors. Finally, the paper concludes with the allusion to some defective aspects of these studies and suggests other EFL writing trajectories for scholars to consider in future studies.

The Effect of ‘Power’ as an Instructional Writing Strategy on Students’ Writing Skill Across Gender

The study aimed at: (1) investigating the effect of POWER as an instructional writing strategy on students’ writing skill; (2) analyzing the different effect of POWER across gender; and (3) analyzing problems of writing faced by the students. The explanatory design was applied in this study. A writing post-test was used to obtain the data and were analyzed using One-Way ANOVA. The findings of the study revealed that (1) there was a significant effect of POWER on students’ writing skill: p = .001 with a large effect size (eta = .17); (2) there was a significant difference on the effect of POWER on the students’ writing skill across gender: p = .013 with a large effect size (eta = .18); and (3) the males struggled in editing and revising rather than females. Then, those resulted in the differences quality of their writing, in which point female participants surpassed the males. Therefore, teachers are expected to implement POWER as one of their variants in EFL writing instruction