---

Among the L2 skills, writing is considered one of the most emotion-wrought aspects of language learning due to the high level of students’ engagement and investment in the composing process. Nevertheless, many L2 teachers have neglected the psychological aspects of writing which can be traced to the profession’s history of emphasizing cognition over emotion. Positive Psychology principles highlight the fact that the students’ success in accomplishing educational tasks such as writing depends not only on their knowledge, effort and perseverance but also their psycho-emotional status. Accordingly, the present study, adopting a correlational design, investigated the associations between 40 Iranian EFL learners' writing performance and their perceptions of a set of positive psychology constructs. The required data were collected based on the students' performance on two essay writing tasks and their responses to the items of L2-specific academic buoyancy, L2 writing mindset and willingness to write questionnaires. The correlation coefficients indicated no statistically significant relationship between the students' writing performance and the positive psychology constructs investigated; nevertheless, there was a significant positive relationship between academic buoyancy and willingness to write variables. In addition, the multiple regression analysis showed that among the subscales of the positive psychology measures, the positive acceptance of academic life and regularity adaptation could best predict the writing performance of the students. The MANOVA results also indicated no statistically significant differences among more-skilled, moderately-skilled and less-skilled student writers in terms of academic buoyancy, mindset and willingness to write.
 

---

Following a case study research design, the present paper reports on a cross-cultural project (called Ibunka2019), in which the author monitored his English as a Foreign Language (EFL) writing classes. The project is an email-based exchange among learners of English from six countries (Algeria, Brazil, Indonesia, Japan, Taiwan, and the Netherlands). For data collection, the Algerian participants’ emic perspective was accessed via their self-reports, gained by a post-project online survey; besides, their messages produced as well as the discussions with them during and after the project made valuable retrospective data for the present study. Particularly, the study discusses the merits of the project relative to the writing module, manifestations of learner autonomy, and the challenges encountered. Moreover, it tackled other relevant issues, namely the integration of interculturality, EFL learner mindset, and lingua franca perspective. This study adds to the scarce literature within the Algerian context on telecollaborative EFL teaching and learning

---

In case not enough caution is exercised in the assessment of second or foreign language learners’ writing performance, one cannot trust the accuracy of decisions made accordingly. As experts or trained raters are often not available or it is not cost-effective to employ them in most educational contexts, writing assessment is often carried out by language instructors, who may not enjoy an adequate competence in teaching and assessing L2 writing. This makes the investigation of the accuracy of ratings done by language teachers a must. In so doing, 30 language teachers in three groups, each with a different background in teaching English and L2 writing, were selected, and their ratings of 30 IELTS samples were compared against those of expert raters using One-Way ANOVA tests. A statistically significant difference was found among the raters for the total writing score as well as the four components, with the L2 writing teachers demonstrating the closest performance to that of the expert rater and with language teachers with no or very little background in teaching L2 writing demonstrating the lowest accuracy. Moreover, the only significant correlations were found between the ratings done by the writing teachers and those of the expert rater, indicating that only they could interpret the scoring criteria not significantly different from the expert rater. The results demonstrate that language teachers are not generally suitable writing raters as they are affected by their own teaching background and understanding of the rating criteria.