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Literacy demands placed upon learners of English for academic purposes continues to increase with growing online access to scholarly communities from around the world. To gain full access to these resources, English learners need to develop the requisite skills to consume and produce these texts. Therefore, the purpose of this research was to examine whether online machine translation (MT) can support the academic reading and writing development of second language learners. A pre-test/post-test quasiexperimental design was used where the treatment group was provided with opportunities to read academic articles with MT support to establish whether it could improve their academic vocabulary knowledge, written grammar ability and academic writing. Results were that machine translation tools allow learners to scaffold their comprehension of challenging academic texts to improve their L2 written grammar but not support their vocabulary development or overall L2 writing ability. These findings help to establish the value of using machine translation tools to support academic literacy in English by showing that they contribute to gains in L2 written grammar. Academic writing teachers may consider integrating these tools more into their courses to improve their students’ academic literacy and develop their L2 learning autonomy. |
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