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The language for school writing: Monolingual and EFL writing across contexts

2020
Qin, W., & Uccelli, P. (2020). Beyond linguistic complexity: Assessing register flexibility in EFL writing across contexts. Assessing Writing , 45, 100465.
2019
Galloway, E., Qin, W., Uccelli, P., & Barr, C. (2019). The role of cross-disciplinary academic language skills in disciplinary, source-based writing: investigating the role of core academic language skills in science summarization for middle grade writers. Reading and Writing , 33.
Qin, W., & Uccelli, P. (2019). Metadiscourse: Variation across communicative contexts. Journal of Pragmatics , 139, 22-39.
Uccelli, P., Deng, Z., Galloway, E., & Qin, W. (2019). The Role of Language Skills in Mid-Adolescents’ Science Summaries. Journal of Literacy Research , 51, 1086296X1986020.
2018
Galloway, E., & Uccelli, P. (2018). Beyond reading comprehension: exploring the additional contribution of Core Academic Language Skills to early adolescents’ written summaries. Reading and Writing , 32.
2016
Qin, W., & Uccelli, P. (2016). Same language, different functions: A cross-genre analysis of Chinese EFL learners’ writing performance. Journal of Second Language Writing , 33, 3-17.
2015
Galloway, E., & Uccelli, P. (2015). Modeling the relationship between lexico-grammatical and discourse organization skills in middle grade writers: insights into later productive language skills that support academic writing. Reading and Writing , 28.
2013
Uccelli, P., Dobbs, C. L., & Scott, J. (2013). Mastering Academic Language: Organization and Stance in the Persuasive Writing of High School Students. Written Communication , 30 (1), 36-62. Publisher's VersionAbstract
Beyond mechanics and spelling conventions, academic writing requires progressive mastery of advanced language forms and functions. Pedagogically useful tools to assess such language features in adolescents’ writing, however, are not yet available. This study examines language predictors of writing quality in 51 persuasive essays produced by high school students attending a linguistically and ethnically diverse inner-city school in the Northeastern United States. Essays were scored for writing quality by a group of teachers, transcribed and analyzed to generate automated lexical and grammatical measures, and coded for discourse-level elements by researchers who were blind to essays’ writing quality scores. Regression analyses revealed that beyond the contribution of length and lexico-grammatical intricacy, the frequency of organizational markers and one particular type of epistemic stance marker (i.e., epistemic hedges) significantly predicted persuasive essays’ writing quality. Findings shed light on discourse elements relevant for the design of pedagogically informative assessment tools.