Mr. Nicholas Walker

FieldRelated.com offers an objective way for learners to establish whether or not they have consistently used academic or conversation vocabulary and if they have used field-related vocabulary for English for Specific Purposes courses. The learner simply copy-pastes their text into the text-box and hits “Analyze”. For speakers of French, overly Latinate diction makes for poor blog writing and storytelling. For students in academic fields, knowing which words make your text seem conversational can help you employ a more consistent tone.

CorrectiveFeedback.com will revolutionize the provision of corrective feedback on ESL writing. Start by creating a grid. Add the tools you need, configure them, and start correcting. Here are just some of the tools available on the system:

–VirtualWritingTutor Tool (Check for Errors)
–FieldRelated Tool (Check for field-of-study vocabulary)
–Word choice Tool (Check for academic word list)
–Statistics Tool (word count, sentence length)
–Automatic Randomized Comments (Define your comments in advance and the system will randomly select one for you to give your student. You always sound fresh and can maintain the voice-of-the-reader no matter how tired you feel.)
–Target Structure Tool (Check for target phrases in the text.)
–Audio Tool (Send MP3 messages with your comments–a virtual writing conference.)
–Pronunciation Tool (Check, model with TTS, and score target pronunciation using penalties and rewards.)
–Rubric Tool (Define expectations with descriptors and scores.)
–Total Score Tool (Calculate the score generated by the other tools and display it with comments.)
–Many other tools either do pre-defined searches or load pre-defined rubrics which you can modify.

Once you have your grid, paste a student’s text into the text area and hit “Analyze.” The system then analyzes the text using each of the tools in sequence. Once it is done, it shows you the result for you to review and comment on. When you are satisfied with the feedback. click “Print report” to generate a PDF containing your corrective feedback. Alternatively, you can return the feedback in an email with the PDF as an attachment. Altogether, it is a very powerful system.

I ask students to check their writing for errors using Virtual Writing Tutor. It is particularly effective at catching second language writing errors. It returns some false alarms, but it catches errors that MS Word misses. I use it with my students to help them with peer assessment activities. With it, they can check to see if an anonymous classmate has corrected all his or her errors. I would certainly recommend it to a colleague since it can dramatically reduce the number of errors a student makes in a final draft, and therefore it reduces the amount of time the teacher has to spend on providing corrective feedback.