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Contents
Introduction
English writing enhancement tools refer to those for writing enhancement purposes which are programs used to provide proofreading, polish writing for pupils and make some part of education more effective and efficient. It covers many categories which are including lexical resources, grammar check, writing polish, writing format tools, etc. English writing enhancement tools serve as tools both for native speakers (NS) and non-native speakers (NNS).
Background Theory
"Writing across the Curriculum"
This is an influential approach to teaching writing within the disciplines. Students' literacy problems become most obvious in their writing (Wingate,2018). As an important part of students' academic literacy, writing instruction within the discipline is of great importance for institutions, teachers and students. Like the Academic Word List, it provides 570-word families which aims at academic purpose could serve as a role for teachers and students in academic writing. Like the writing polish tools, currently, numerous tools could be used in the discipline's perspective. Aiming at enhancing and polishing writing, online writing enhancement tools are of utmost benefit in the movement of "Writing Across the Curriculum".
The SAMR Model
As a way for teachers to evaluate how their cooperating with technology into their instructional practice and evaluate how technology integrating in the classroom, the SAMR model, proposed by Puentedura (2010, 2013), is stratified into four levels, including Substitution, Augmentation, Modification and Redefinition. The SAMR model could serve as a role of evaluating the use of technology, designing tasks (targeting high order thinking skills), engaging students in rich learning experiences and impact students' achievements. Writing enhancement tools in the SAMR model could be illustrated with augmentation tool, which could enhance productivity via the tool of spell checking/ grammar checking; modification tool, which could aid creative writing via feedback and enhancement suggestions; redefinition tool, which would be of great benefits for students' creation, critical thinking, collaboration and communication.
Error Analysis (EA)
The fact that not all errors are explicable by Contrastive Analysis (CA) resulted in a disillusionment with contrastive analysis. Gradually CA was replaced by the error analysis movement; a major claim is that many errors made by L2 learners were caused by factors other than L1 interference.
(1) Error vs. Mistake: In the literature on error analysis, errors and mistakes are offer differentiated (Lyster & Ranta, 1997). Errors usually result from the leaners' lack of knowledge, which represents a lack of competence. In other words, learners do not know the right form or are unable to use language correctly. However, mistakes often occur when learners fail to perform their competence. In other words, the learner has already learned the knowledge or skill but simply cannot function correctly due to lack of attention or other factors.
(2) Different types of errors: interlingual errors and intra-lingual errors; omissions, additions, double markings, mis-formations and mis-orderings.
(3) The procedure of error analysis: Recognition -- Description -- Explanation Via various types of feedback and error analysis, writing enhancement tools are regarded as tools for enhancing students' academic writing. Besides, as the study of Yilmaz (2016) indicated that feedback exposure condition exerts influence on the extent to which learners benefit from feedback.
Input and Language Learning
Comprehensible input: According to Krashen's input hypothesis (1985), learners acquire language as a result of comprehending input addressed to them. Krashen brought forward the concept of the "i+1 principle". Input should neither be so far beyond their ability that they are overwhelmed, nor so close to their current stage that they are not challenged at all.
Input in SLA: The roles of frequency, form and function (Ellis, 2009): The investigations reported broadly adopt functional linguistic, cognitive-linguistic, psycholinguistic, corpus-linguistic and constructionist perspectives. Based on input frequency, input form and the function of input, input matters are regarded useful for L2 learners.
Situated Learning
Learning is situated in the activity in which it takes place. Learning is doing. Meaningful learning will only take place if it is embedded in the social and physical context within which it will be used. Knowledge is situated, being in part a product of the activity, context, and culture in which it is developed and used. Therefore, learning methods that are embedded in authentic situations are not merely useful; they are essential (Brown et al 1989)
Intelligent CALL
Informative and error-specific feedback, instructional guidance and scaffolding. Writing enhancement and polish tools could be seen as good examples for intelligent CALL.
Technology Enhanced Language Learning (TELL)
Considering the roles in TELL(Walker & White, 2013), it could be divided into role as a tutor, role as a tutee, role as a tool and role as a medium. As for the role as a tutor, it emphasize the language input through technology. Writing enhancement tools like corpus, lexical resources tools and polish writing tools can provide various kinds of language input through technology. Through trials and errors, writing enhancement tools enable learners to learn and acquire new knowledge in the process of learning.
Online Writing Enhancement Tools for ESL Learning
Corpus
Corpus of Contemporary America English (COCA)
Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) is currently the largest free English corpus. It consists of texts containing 520 million words. These texts are composed of five different types of spoken language, novels, popular magazines, newspapers, and academic articles. Stylistic composition. From 1990 to 2015, the corpus expanded at an annual rate of 20 million words to ensure the timeliness of the corpus content. Therefore, the American contemporary English corpus is considered to be the most suitable English corpus for observing the current development of American English.
Compared with traditional dictionaries, COCA has the following advantages:
(1) The text of the corpus is relatively real-time. Words such as life satisfaction and social media are not included in many traditional dictionaries, but can be found in the corpus.
(2) The corpus can provide word frequency information of a word, which helps us understand the frequency of occurrence of the word in practical applications and helps to achieve accurate word use.
(3) The corpus can also provide functions such as fuzzy search and word collocation.
The British National Corpus (BNC)
The British National Corpus is currently the largest corpus that can be used directly on the Internet. It is the British Oxford Press, Longman Publishing Company, Chambers-Hallop Publishing Company, Oxford University Computer Service Center, Lancaster English Computer Center and A large-scale corpus jointly developed and established by the British Library was completed in 1994. The British National Corpus is a sample of wide-ranging written and spoken languages. It contains 100 million words of electronic resources to present British English since the late 20th century, involving spoken and written English. The corpus of written and spoken languages coexists, with a word volume of more than 100 million, and 4124 articles representing a wide range of modern British English texts. Among them, written language accounts for 90%, and spoken language accounts for 10%.
Link: the British National Corpus
WebCorp
WebCorp is a suite of tools which allows access to the World Wide Web as a corpus - a large collection of texts from which facts about the language can be extracted. WebCorp was created and is operated and maintained by the Research and Development Unit for English Studies (RDUES) in the School of English at Birmingham City University.
Lexical Resources
The Academic Word List (AWL)
The Academic Word List is a useful English resource which serves as a role of English for Academic Purposes for lectures and students. It was developed and evaluated by Averil Coxhead (2000, 2011) from School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. The list contains 570 word families which does not include words that are in the most frequent 2000 words of English. A written corpus of academic English was developed for the purpose of finding out which words occurred in a wide range of academic texts from a variety of subject areas. The Academic Corpus contained approximately 3,500,000 running words. It was divided into four faculty sections: Arts, Commerce, Law and Science. Each of these faculty sections contained approximately 875,000 running words. Each faculty section was divided into seven subject areas of approximately 125,000 running words. The headwords of the Academic Word List (AWL) are the stem form of the words. The number after each headword is the sublist the word family is in. The sublists have the word families of the AWL with the most frequently used member of the family in italics. The word list has been divided into sublists based on the frequency of occurrence of the words in the Academic Corpus. The words in Sublist 1 occur more frequently in the corpus than the other words in the list. Sublist 2 occurs with the next highest frequency.
The Free Dictionary
Applicable people: all English learners
This dictionary integrates the definitions of mainstream dictionaries, and you can find more complete definitions and usage without switching the dictionary. The dictionary also has functions of querying synonyms, antonyms, medical dictionary, legal dictionary, financial dictionary and so on. Meanwhile, this dictionary has a daily column, which could be used as a learning tool for all English learners. At present, the dictionary can be downloaded in the Apple store, or it can be searched directly on the web version.
Link: Website of the Free Dictionary
Phrase Bank
This website is created by Dr. John Morley of the University of Manchester. Based on the concept of "speech" proposed by John Swales, the website provides a wealth of academic writing phrases and sentence patterns from five parts: Introducing work, referring to sources, describing methods, discussing findings and writing conclusions. All phrases and sentence patterns are derived from academic papers of native English speakers, which can be used by teachers, students and researchers for academic writing.
Example sentences from the webpage:
Introducing questions, problems and limitations: theory or argument
•The main weakness with this theory is that …
•The key problem with this explanation is that …
•However, this theory does not fully explain why …
Thesaurus
Thesaurus is a dictionary that lists synonyms and antonyms for each word. English includes too many words, and each meaning has many synonyms. Sometimes in order to avoid repetition, or find more accurate expression, Thesaurus is needed. For example, the simplest word is "see" when expressing the meaning of perceiving with eyes. Taping the word "see" in Thesaurus, the following words are accessible, like hold, descry, discern, distinguish, espy, eye, look (at), note, notice, observe, perceive, regard, remark, sight, spy, view, witness. As another example, the word "very" is used in an article about four times. Avoiding too many repetitions, Thesaurus would illustrate other words for replacing, like extremely, incredibly, awfully, exceptionally, exceedingly, especially, dreadfully, extraordinarily, enormously, fantastically, vastly. Considering non-native speakers' vocabulary is relatively limited, using Thesaurus as a tool would enrich the lexical resources of the article. Later, it was found that many native speakers are also used in this way since there are too many synonyms in English and they also need the help of dictionary.
Linggle
Linggle could search the most correct English expression in different contexts, which helps to analyze more accurate English writing suggestions. In addition, it could also guess short sentences and sentences based on part of speech, and accurately analyze how to write complete English sentences.
Major functions of Linggle would be listed below:
•Writing Ahead
Typing a few words and then a couple of underscores _ . It allows you to find recurring phrases following the words.
•Checking Whether a Word Is Needed
A question mark ? followed by a word (e.g., to) allows you to check whether the word is needed in a phrase.
•Deciding on Alternative Phrases
Linggle not in the/a position to and you will get the frequency ratios of not in the position to (4%) and not in a position to (94%). Phrases with a high frequency count are usually preferred.
•Finding Collocations
Linggle's unique and very best feature is that keywords can be combined with any part of speech to create a search query for finding collocations.
•Precise Collocation Queries
Linggle uses a simple strategy to handle queries that involve parts of speech.
Urban Dictionary
Applicable people: all English learners
Commonly used slang and Internet terms can be found in this dictionary for usage and interpretation, which is a function not available in other dictionaries. The homepage of this dictionary will set up a daily word item column, which will introduce a new vocabulary with pictures and example sentences everyday. For the most commonly used word explanations, it will be placed in the top definition column, and many unused or even unused usages which cannot be searched in other dictionaries would be included in this dictionary. In addition, the example sentences for word collocation are more life-oriented in this dictionary. This dictionary is suitable for the collection of European and American youth language, young man's mantra, slang colloquialism, internet language, song and film and television language, etc.
JustTheWord
JustTheWord, a word query website, could be quickly queried the common collocation usage of a word, which is easy to operate. After the query is completed, the query result will be automatically returned.
Textranch
The biggest feature of the word query website Textranch is that it has two search boxes. It could be entered two different words, phrases or sentences in these two search boxes to query which one is used most frequently.
Netspeak
Netspeak is a tool that provides free online translation of words, phrases and sentences. It can search and compare various English vocabulary, short sentences, grammar, word interpretation and other content online, and calculate the change of this term. In addition, Netspeak could also analyze the use frequency and situation, which is similar to "Linggle". After landing on Netspeak, the official example is to use "* #" to get synonyms, the effect obtained with "#" is more biased towards the replacement of synonyms of single words, and the result obtained with "*" is biased towards short sentences / phrases.
OneLook Reverse Dictionary
Most people may have encountered such a situation that want to express a certain meaning, but can not remember which specific words should be used to describe. Or just know a common word but don't understand how to express it in more authentic English. OneLook Reverse Dictionary can help you solve this problem. As long as you search for the meaning you want to express in the search box, the software will give you a series of related words and phrases. For example, if you want to express that you are going to have a vacation, and want to travel "urge to travel" very much, the software gives wanderlust, itchy feet, and so on.
Polishing Tools
Count Wordsworth
After entering the article on the page, the website can count the number of words and the number of sentences, and also count the frequency of nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, articles, etc. used in articles. Corresponding statistics will be made. This is a useful statistical tool for both students and teachers.
Grammarly
It is an online free proofreading + plagiarism inspection tool which could help you check several types of errors.
•Grammar and punctuation: It can detect grammatical and punctuation errors-from basic to advanced. It also provides real-time advice and guidance on how to correct these errors.
•Spell Check: It is also a powerful spell checking tool that can guarantee your writing without errors. It is also a powerful spell checking tool.
•Plagiarism check: Grammarly can detect plagiarism by comparing your writing to billions of web pages on the web.
•Writing style: It can also help you self-edit your work by providing real-time insights about your readability score, sentence length, etc. This is very useful for adjusting specific types of writing styles for specific audiences.
Who is suitable for Grammarly?
Grammarly is very useful for people whose native language is English and those who do not often write in English. People using Grammarly include:
•Blog: Content marketers and writers •Author: Any business professional who wants to draft accurate reports, presentations, emails or social media posts. •Students: For new writers and professional writers, this grammar checker can serve as another line of defense, even if they are native English speakers.
SlickWrite
Slick Write is a grammar checking tool that can be used without registration. This tool does not check spelling or grammatical errors, but analyzes the style of the sentence and proposes such as "too many adverbs used in the full text", "too many sentence heads used the same word The" and "the sentence used "Too many prepositional phrases" and other suggestions.
StyleWriter
This software can be used with embedded words, the main function is to check spelling, grammar and other errors, polish the article. There will be tips about grammar choices to make the expression of the article more authentic. The three main indicators of Style's article retouching are: bog index, ave statement, and passive index. Among them, Bog index stands for the "pre-determinability" of the article, which is defined as Bog Index = sentence Bog + word Bog-Pep, and sentence-bog is determined by sentence length, which is equal to the square of the average sentence length divided by the maximum sentence length. Word-bog is about words, such as difficult words, big words, special words, etc., including passive voice. Pep is a very interesting concept, such as good arguments and questions, interesting expressions, etc. The Bog index includes according to the standards of Style-writer, good articles should be short and succinct sentences, clean and neat words, and use as few passive voices as possible. Conversely, if the sentence is long, the words are biased, and there are many passive voices, the Bog index can be used, and the lower the article level, the bog of good articles defined on this website should be below 20.
Nounplus
NounPlus is an online English grammar detection and correction tool that can be used for grammar problems in English. Nounplus tool's grammar algorithm mainly focuses on grammar and syntax, and has more than 1,000 commonly used grammar error screening mechanisms. In addition, you can also install mobile applications to use, providing Android and iOS mobile applications.
Ginger
This tool can check grammar and spelling errors in Microsoft word, PowerPoint, Outlook, Gmail and web pages. Ginger's sentence Re-phraser can help you present your original writing in an authentic way; text-to-speech can also help you learn English best. After entering the text, you can choose English or American, male or female, absolutely absolutely pure and authentic; The translation function can translate your English thesis into authentic French, Greek and so on. Therefore, Ginger is only a grammar, pinyin proofing software, or English writing software, translation software, spoken language learning software, a universal software to improve English.
1Checker
1checker is an English automatic checking and correction service tool. In addition to providing English writing skills to correct grammatical errors and automatic draft correction, it also has a specific composition scoring mode, stores commonly used typos and new words dictionary, and provides a wealth of commercial English letters and English Composition templates and other resources. It is completely free for individual users, providing online version, desktop version, Mac version, Windows 8 version application, word plug-in, writing template, such software is very practical for learning English, especially error correction function, intelligent software It is 100% accurate, but the degree of use is still sufficient.
PolishMyWriting
Pasting the written article or paragraph in the text box above, the system will automatically recognize the grammatical errors and spelling errors. All spelling errors will be marked in red, and grammatical errors will be marked in green. The most important thing is that PolishMyWriting will also intimately write suggestions in blue font.
Reverso Spell Checker
In addition to checking grammar and spelling errors, it also helps to find synonyms for each word in the article. The most important thing is to make some suggestions to delete some words, add new words, change punctuation, etc.
The Writers' Diet
The Writer's Diet will help you energize your writing and strip unnecessary padding from your prose. First, diagnose your verbal fitness levels by taking the online WritersDiet Test. Next, follow the no-nonsense advice in each chapter of the book to strengthen and tone your verbal muscles. Writers at every level, from students to professionals, will benefit from the Writer's Diet workout. Before long, you will find your self producing stylish, energetic prose every time you put pen to paper.
Cliche Finder
Cliche Finder is a Cliche software that can help you find out the articles used in the article. All Cliche will be marked red, suitable for further inspection after writing.
Hemingway
The analysis function of Hemingway Editor can analyze the words and readability of the article, which would be useful for verbose person. As long as the written paragraphs are copied and pasted onto the software, it will tell the author where to streamline and where to delete. Which sentences will make the reader Confuse, and which should use the active voice rather than passive. Of course, in addition to this, it will also give some tips on how to replace the original sentence, make the sentence more concise, and score the index for readability.
Improvement Tools
Write & Improve
Cambridge officials have launched a heavyweight English writing online practice pen and evaluation system that serves the majority of candidates and English lovers. The website interface navigation is very clear. Click "Start writing" on the homepage to start the trial without registration. Selecting an entrance first is equivalent to setting a level goal you want to achieve, including beginner, intermediate and advanced. Immediately afterwards, you can enter the "Workbook" equivalent to the writing question bank that meets the goal of the level you just selected. The launch of the Write & Improve website is good news for candidates who want to prepare for Cambridge certification. The propositions of the writing test are very sophisticated. Can the dry text (Rubrics) guide students to complete the writing task while pointing out the writing requirements, and assist them in multiple review and correction, which is of great importance and difficulty. , Not a general "simulation problem". Therefore, Cambridge officials can launch this platform with its rigorous and professional proposition requirements in the form of AWE (Automated Writing Evaluation).
Virtual Writing Tutor
Virtual Writing Tutor's grammar detection function is very diverse. It can count words, detect spelling of words, check sentence grammar, look up dictionaries, print, etc. Coping the text to be detected into the text box and select the required function.
Format
Purdue Online Writing Lab (Purdue OWL)
It is Purdue's writing lab, all of which are instructions about writing in English. The website mainly provides guidelines for two common academic paper writing formats and some other writing reference resources that academic workers may use.
Educational Benefits of Writing Enhancement Tools
From Students' Perspective
•Students can polish their writing and acquire the knowledge of academic writing
It creates opportunities for students to practice and sharpen a number of writing skills, including the ability to check the spell and grammar errors in their own writing assignments, cultivate critical thinking via sorts of online feedbacks, and create in-depth reflective responses.
•Students are more likely to approach academic literacy
As an important part of academic literacy, writing assignments reflect students’ learning process of the target language. Via writing enhancement tools, students’ lexical resources would be more abundant, sentence structures would be more authentic, which would be a benefit to approaching academic literacy.
From Faculty Members' Perspective
•Provide metrics for teachers to assess students
•Faculty members spend less time on proofreading
Limitations
•Limitation in Accuracy: Because of the use of big data analysis and intelligent methods, there may be certain limitations about accuracy. Therefore, learners should pay attention to revision and improvement when using these tools. It would be a good choice for learners to occasionally use multiple writing enhancement and polish tools to achieve the article's polish and modified effect.
•Limitation in Network Speed: After attempts in Mainland China, Hong Kong, Japan and other areas by testers, some of the tools may collapse since sometimes there may have a capacity of thousands of members online during the peak time. In addition, due to some network limitations, some tools are unavailable or the Internet speed will be limited in some areas.
See also
Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis(CA)
Scaffold Students' Writing with Technology
References
Averil (2000) A New Academic Word List. TESOL Quarterly, 34(2): 213-238.
Brown, J.S., Collins, A., & Duguid, P. (1989). Situated cognition and the culture of learning. Educational Researcher, 18(1), 32–42.
Coxhead, A. (2000). A new academic word list. TESOL Quarterly, 34, 213–238.
Coxhead, A. (2011). The Academic Word List ten years on: Research and teaching implications. TESOL Quarterly, 45, 355–362.
Ellis, R. (2012). Language teaching research and language pedagogy. Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell.
Krashen, Stephen (1985). The Input Hypothesis: Issues and implications. London: Longman.
Lyster, R., & Ranta, L. (1997). Corrective feedback and learner uptake. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 19, 37–66.
Puentedura, R. "SAMR and TPCK: Intro to advanced practice." Retrieved February 12 (2010): 2013.
Puentedura, R. (2010). SAMR and TPCK: Intro to advanced practice. Retrieved February, 12, 2013.
Walker, A. and White, G. (2013). Chapter 1: Learning. Preview the documentTechnology Enhanced Language Learning: Connecting Theory and Practice
Wingate, U. (2018). Academic literacy across the curriculum: Towards a collaborative instructional approach. Language Teaching, 51(3), 349-364.
Yilmaz, Y. (2016). The role of exposure condition in the effectiveness of explicit correction. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 38, 65- 96.
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