This study explored students’ grammatical, mechanical, and lexical errors in EFL writing. Also, it aimed to investigate the effect of instructor feedback throughout the semester on students’ types and frequency of errors in two types of essays, including a process essay and an argumentative essay. This study was conducted on 24 EFL students studying in their first year of college in the applied linguistics department. To achieve the purpose of the study, the researcher used a descriptive qualitative study that dealt with document analysis. The author analyzed ten documents to understand how teacher feedback could develop students’ levels in the target language and increase their abilities to properly use the grammatical, mechanical, and lexical rules in academic writing. Thus, the researcher used five written samples of students’ process essays and five written samples of their argumentative essays to compare and find out about students’ academic writing progress. The findings of this study revealed that the instructor’s feedback positively impacted students’ writing development and gradually helped them overcome the committed errors. There were significant differences in students’ writing samples before and after the instructor’s feedback. Therefore, EFL students’ writing of the argumentative essays showed noticeable progress in students’ language use and a reduction in the number of errors that students committed in their process essays.

Focusing on integrating teaching and learning grammatical structures in real actions and practices has been critical and one of the cornerstones in the Teaching English as a Second Language (TESOL) domain. This paper emphasizes exposing EFL learners to actual tasks and opportunities they can benefit from in their future careers, along with understanding the meanings and functions of gerunds and infinitives. The situated learning theory was used to frame the current study on EFL students taking the grammar 1 course. The number of students was 60, but the study sample was seven students, which selected randomly. Students were guided to use gerunds and infinitives to develop a cover letter for one of the agencies they selected rather than apply those rules to artificial tasks. The sampled data of the qualitative research was used to analyze students’ cover letters by investigating two main concepts. First, their use of gerunds and infinitives; second, the elements of writing professional cover letters. The findings showed students’ accurate usage of gerunds and infinitives in different phrases, such as opening, closing, and body paragraphs, to present their educational background and experiences. Thus, the findings showed that the cover letters that have been written by the participants were not the best, but they achieved the general guidelines of creating cover letters and applied the targeted rules. EFL teachers are recommended to enhance their students with variety of authentic tasks that integrate the use of grammatical structures and the practice of using these structurers in real tasks.

This study investigated the effectiveness of providing instruction to EFL students by analyzing important components of writing a professional resumé. Through this qualitative research, a comparison between two different undergraduate groups at different universities was carried out. The first group, considered the instructed group, received instruction on how to write resumé through pursuing a professional writing course. The second group, called a non-instructed group, was not exposed to professional writing, nor to any instruction on how to write a professional resumé. In this study, sampled data was used as the research method to investigate the research question. Findings revealed the importance of providing instruction to learners because the first group outperformed the other group based on the specific components of writing a resumé taught to them. It was also evident that a formal learning of professional writing helps learners to shape their experiences and integrate them with their language background, to create a professional resumé that can attract readers’ attention.

In this current study, we explored Saudi undergraduate students’ perceptions toward netiquette rules in professional and formal emails through their communication with their professor in spring semester 2020. We investigated how learners formulated their formal emails in an academic domain or for their future careers whether they needed clarification, asked question, or shared issues. To apply this research, we chose critical discourse analysis as a theoretical framework to understand students’ perceptions and practices. This qualitative study applied open-ended questions survey, semi-structured interviews, and document analysis (students’ emails) with a thick description of their perceptions and practices. We had seven Saudi students from TESOL course. The data was analyzed through vivo coding that went through three different phases and wrote separate memos for every participant to reflect the intended meaning of the data. The results of the study revealed students’ understanding of netiquette rules in professional emails. However, students’ actual practices under stressful situations showed that they did not always follow the netiquette rules in emails with their professor.   Received: 21 April 2022 / Accepted: 29 June 2022 / Published: 5 July 2022