This edited book brings together contributions from different educational contexts across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) in order to explore how L2 English writing is assessed. Across seven MENA countries, the book covers aspects of practice including: task design and curriculum alignment, test (re)development, rubric design, the subjective decision making that underpins assessing students' writing and feedback provision, learner performance and how research methods help shed light on initiatives to improve student writing. In such coverage, chapter authors provide concrete evidence of how assessment practice is governed by their unique context, yet also influenced by international standards, trends and resources. This book will be of interest to second language teachers, assessors and programme developers as well as test designers and evaluators.

This book provides an overview of current trends and practices in English Language Teaching (ELT) across the European Union. It offers insights into key ELT issues which are at the forefront of twenty-first-century classrooms. It discusses theoretical and empirical work based on topics such as linguistic imperialism, English as a Medium of Instruction, contrastive language analysis, and the interplay between English and the use of countries’ respective native languages.  It also explores the challenges of English Language Teaching under different circumstances such as, while using different technological platforms, working with different learner groups (those with Special Educational Needs) and revising traditional practices in grammar and vocabulary teaching. Throughout the book, the link between policy, theory and practice is explicitly highlighted and exemplified. The book is of interest to ELT instructors, course designers, language teachers and teacher trainers, and students enrolled in pre-service English training courses.

This Element explores relationships between collocations, writing quality, and learner and contextual variables in a first-year composition (FYC) programme. Comprising three studies, the Element is anchored in understanding phraseological complexity and its sub-constructs of sophistication and diversity. First, the authors look at sophistication through association measures. They tap into how these measures may tell us different types of information about collocation via a cluster analysis. Selected measures from this clustering are used in a cumulative links model to establish relationships between these measures, measures of diversity and measures of task, the language background of the writer and individual writer variation, and writing quality scores. A third qualitative study of the statistically significant predictors helps understand how writers use collocations and why they might be favoured or downgraded by raters. This Element concludes by considering the implications of this modelling for assessment.

Quantitative corpus research on written language development has expanded rapidly in recent years, assisted by the ever-increasing power and accessibility of software capable of reliably analysing huge collections of learner writing. For this work to reach its full potential, it is important that researchers have a strong understanding of its methodological foundations and of the existing empirical evidence base on which it can build. This book provides the most comprehensive discussion to date of research in this area. Covering both first and second language learning contexts, it sets out a coherent theoretical framework and systematically reviews studies published over the last seventy years in order to establish what such research has taught us about written language development, what it hasn't taught us, and what we should do next. Timely and original, this is an essential reference work for academic researchers and students of first and second language writing.

Quantitative corpus research on written language development has expanded rapidly in recent years, assisted by the ever-increasing power and accessibility of software capable of reliably analysing huge collections of learner writing. For this work to reach its full potential, it is important that researchers have a strong understanding of its methodological foundations and of the existing empirical evidence base on which it can build. This book provides the most comprehensive discussion to date of research in this area. Covering both first and second language learning contexts, it sets out a coherent theoretical framework and systematically reviews studies published over the last seventy years in order to establish what such research has taught us about written language development, what it hasn't taught us, and what we should do next. Timely and original, this is an essential reference work for academic researchers and students of first and second language writing.