Using online annotations to support error correction and corrective feedback

Giving feedback on second language (L2) writing is a challenging task. This research proposed an interactive environment for error correction and corrective feedback. First, we developed an online corrective feedback and error analysis system called Online Annotator for EFL Writing. The system consisted of five facilities: Document Maker, Annotation Editor, Composer, Error Analyzer, and Viewer. With this system, teachers can mark error corrections on online documents and students can receive corrective feedback accordingly. The system also classifies and displays error types based on user query. Second, an experiment was conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of this system. Fifty EFL (English as a Foreign Language) college freshmen were randomly assigned to two groups. The experimental group received corrective feedback with the developed system whereas the control group used the paper-based error correction method. After the treatment, students in both groups conducted corrective feedback activities by correcting the same document written by an EFL student. The experimental results were encouraging in that the analysis of students’ corrective feedback revealed significantly better performance in the experimental group on recognizing writing errors. Implications for further research are discussed.     

The impact of computer‐based instruction on the development of EFL learners' writing skills

The current study investigated the application and effectiveness of computer assisted language learning (CALL) in teaching academic writing to Iranian EFL (English as a Foreign Language) learners by means of Microsoft Word Office. To this end, 44 sophomore intermediate university students majoring in English Language and Literature at an Iranian university who had enrolled in a course called Advanced Writing were randomly divided into two groups. As a pre‐test, a pen‐and‐paper writing task was given to both groups at the beginning of the semester. The control group including 24 male and female students was taught based on traditional approach while the experimental group including 20 male and female students was taught based on CALL. At the end of one semester, a pen‐and‐paper writing task was given to both groups. The results of the post‐test revealed that the students who were exposed to computer‐based instruction outperformed their counterparts in terms of using appropriate articles, tense, plural forms and spelling. Moreover, the students in the experimental group produced paragraphs of higher quality. The findings of this study confirmed the efficacy of computer‐based instruction in the development of EFL learners' writing skills.     

Promoting contextual vocabulary learning through an adaptive computer‐assisted EFL reading system

The study developed an adaptive computer‐assisted reading system and investigated its effect on promoting English as a foreign language learner‐readers' contextual vocabulary learning performance. Seventy Taiwanese college students were assigned to two reading groups. Participants in the customised reading group read online English texts, each of which was customised by the developed system to offer immediate and repeated meetings with previously encountered unknown words, while participants in the typical reading group read online texts without control on unknown word recurrence. After the 4‐week online reading treatment, the two groups of learners were tested by online immediate and delayed vocabulary tests, and the students from the customised reading group were also required to complete the questionnaire regarding system use. The results showed that the vocabulary mean scores from both immediate and delayed testing demonstrated significantly better results in word gain and word retention with the customised reading group and that the adaptive reading system was appealing for the students. The study demonstrated that by providing customised reading with word recurrence specific to individuals' unknown words, this adaptive computer‐assisted English as a foreign language reading system creates a more favourable condition for foreign language vocabulary growth.     

Cultivating undergraduates' plagiarism avoidance knowledge and skills with an online tutorial system

With the increased use of digital materials, undergraduate writers in English as a foreign language (EFL) contexts have become more susceptible to plagiarism. In this study, the researchers designed a blended English writing course with an online writing tutorial system entitled DWright. The study examined the effectiveness of the online writing tool for helping a group of EFL sophomores in Taiwan develop plagiarism avoidance knowledge, paraphrasing skills, and citation abilities. Mixed‐method data included pretest, posttest, and delayed test, a feedback sheet, writing assignments, interviews, and a post‐course questionnaire, which reported increased awareness on plagiarism avoidance with evidence such as qualitative paraphrasing improvement and positive feedback on the use of DWright for developing plagiarism avoidance knowledge and citation competence. Pedagogical implications for researchers and instructors interested in blending online writing tutorials into their courses for plagiarism avoidance were also discussed.     

Improving ESL writing using an online formulaic sequence word‐combination checker

Writing correct English sentences can be challenging. Furthermore, writing correct formulaic sequences can be especially difficult because accepted combinations do not follow clear rules governing which words appear together in a sequence. One solution is to provide examples of correct usage accompanied by statistical feedback from web‐based applications for learners to emulate. The goal of the study was to investigate whether such a dedicated web‐based program that provides instant examples of correct word combinations and detailed results of who used these examples, where and when, can improve students' writing. Data were collected from 74 ESL (English as a Second Language) undergraduate students divided into control and experimental groups, who performed formulaic sequence tests, wrote passages in English, followed by interviews with members of the experimental group. The results show that students who used the software outperformed those who did not, on the tests and the overall grades for their writing. Implementing formulaic sequence check programs in writing classes to help students decide which words can appear together, under which circumstances, and in which context is recommended.     

A knowledge‐structure‐based adaptive dynamic assessment system for calculus learning

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of a calculus system that was designed using an adaptive dynamic assessment (DA) framework on performance in the “finding an area using an integral”. In this study, adaptive testing and dynamic assessment were combined to provide different test items depending on students’ abilities. Prompts were provided from among various options. Two hundred fifty‐seven freshmen from one public university in Taiwan participated in the study. The pre‐test was held within one week after the examinees learned how to find an area using an integral. Remedial instruction was completed within two weeks, and the students were administered the post‐ test. Two weeks after the administration of the post‐test, a delayed post‐test was administered to evaluate the students’ retention. When an examinee responded to an item correctly, he received a score. Otherwise, the student was given a prompt. In this study, five experimental groups were compared: three different DA groups, one self‐study group and one remedial group instruction. The results of the study revealed that the instructive effect of the adaptive dynamic assessment approach (the third DA group) was the best and that the proposed methods helped students improve their learning performance.     

Initial effects of word processing on writing quality and writing anxiety of freshman writers

Eight English instructors at Marist College, Poughkeepsie, New York, conducted a one-semester controlled experiment with freshman in eight randomly selected classes of College Writing to learn about the initial effects of word processing on essay-writing performance and on writing apprehension. Four classes wrote essays using terminals linked to a mainframe computer (Experimental Group), and four classes wrote essays in the traditional mode using pens, pencils or typewriters (Control Group). The eight instructors agreed upon a common syllabus and common teaching approaches for the freshman writing course. To measure writing performance, they devised an analytic scale. To measure writing apprehension, they used a writing apprehension test developed by Daly and Miller. The Experimental Group showed greater progress than the Control Group from the pre to post Essay Test but could not demonstrate superior performance on the six required essays of the course. For writing apprehension, there was no significant difference between the two groups.Marilyn Poris (Ph.D., Research Methodology, Hofstra University) is currently serving as Director of Institutional Research a Marist College, where she also teaches courses in statistics.Milton Teichman (Ph.D., English, University of Chicago) is professor of English at Marist College, Poughkeepsie, New York. He has directed writing programs in freshman writing and has supervised research in the field of technology and writing. He has written on innovative approaches to the teaching of writing, as well as on a range of literary subjects from the poetry of Wordsworth to the literature of the Holocaust.     

Effects of timing of formative feedback in computer-assisted learning environments

This study examines the effects of timing of corrective formative feedback on processing text information on question-answering. Undergraduate students read an expository text and answered questions in two attempts. Students were randomly assigned to a no feedback, immediate feedback and delayed feedback conditions. Students in the feedback conditions received feedback on the correctness of their answer after the first attempt and were informed about the right answer after the second attempt. Students were prompted to restudy the text after failing in their first attempt. However, students in the no feedback condition were just prompted to search the text. All students were tested on question-answering, corrective probability and a post-test cued-recall test. Results showed that: (a) feedback reduced the initial time reading the text; (b) feedback increased performance on question answering and cued-recall; (c) delayed feedback produced no advantages over immediate feedback. Theoretical and practical implications of these results are discussed.     

Writing as process and product: The impact of tool, genre, audience knowledge, and writer expertise

Two experiments investigated the impact of writing tool (word processing or handwriting), genre (narrative or exposition), and audience (familiar or unfamiliar) on measures of writing quality, syntactic complexity, and number and type of initial text production revisions. In the first, 84 undergraduates with little word processing experience wrote letters by hand or computer. The 64 subjects in Experiment 2 were experienced college writers who always wrote by computer. Subjects composed more syntactically complex letters of higher rated quality to an unfamiliar audience than to a familiar one. Handwritten letters were of higher rated quality than word processed. Although there were more total revisions when using a word processor, there were more text-preserving than meaningful revisions. The number and distribution of revisions also depended upon the writers' level of experience. The Hay es and Flower (1980) model of the writing process remains a useful heuristic, but our data indicate that it warrants extension.     

Implementing an automated feedback program for a foreign language writing course: A learner-centric study

Considering the prominence attached to written corrective feedback (WCF) within the domain of second/foreign language (L2) acquisition, automated writing evaluation (AWE) tools have steadily gained ground over the last two decades. The current study was an attempt to investigate the extent incorporating an AWE program, known as Criterion®, within a process writing framework would affect learners' writing quality in an English as a foreign language context. Moreover, we drew a comparison between the overall effects of computer- versus teacher-generated WCF. Participants consisted of 53 tertiary level students from two intact essay-writing classes. The within-group findings revealed that the experimental group's writing scores rose significantly from the pretest to posttest after receiving automated WCF over several weeks. Significant progress was also noticed on all rounds of scores obtained from five essays assigned to this group except between the first and the second. As for the comparison between computer- and teacher-administered WCF, the former condition was found to be more efficient. Overall, the findings provide a deeper insight into the workings of an automated evaluation tool and how it was employed in the L2 classroom to impart consistency to the assessment procedure and ease the burden traditionally placed upon teachers.     

Developing a computer program to facilitate language training

The present research demonstrates how an instructional program developer can be used as a subject in a series of experiments to determine optimum parameters for a computer program. The research included developing and testing a new training procedure for presentation of English to Spanish and Spanish to English word pairs. The experiments demonstrated that number of word pairs used per lesson (5, 10, or 15 pairs) did not influence how much was learned when lessons were repeated on 3 consecutive days. Constant as opposed to varied orders of pair presentation did not affect the rate at which pairs were learned. Tests with feedback on word pairs 5 and 15 days after training prevented an increase in errors 25 days after training. Repeating lessons on 3 consecutive days as opposed to just 1 day led to fewer errors during tests that occurred 5 or 15 days after training. It did not matter if Spanish to English pairs were presented before or after English to Spanish pairs during a daily training session. In addition, intermixing Spanish to English and English to Spanish pairs did not lead to better performance as compared to presenting English to Spanish or Spanish to English pairs first. The present experiments show how a software developer can be used as the subject in a series of experiments to determine parameters for an educational computer program.     

The effect of text messaging on 9‐ and 10‐year‐old children's reading,spelling and phonological processing skills

This paper reports on an intervention study that considered the impact of text messaging on 9‐ to 10‐year‐old children's literacy skills. One hundred and fourteen children who had never owned a mobile phone before were recruited and randomly allocated to either the intervention or control conditions. All children were pre‐ and post‐tested on a range of reading, spelling and phonological awareness measures. Children in the intervention group were given access to a mobile phone (enabled for text messaging only) for weekends and during half‐term break for a 10‐week period. It was found that there were no significant differences between the two groups of children in terms of their literacy attainment during that period. However, within the mobile phone group, there was evidence that use of text abbreviations was positively related to gains in literacy skills. Moreover, after controlling for individual differences in IQ, and the children's performance at pre‐test, textism usage was able to account for a significant amount of variance in post‐test spelling scores. These results show that text messaging does not adversely affect the development of literacy skills within this age group, and that the children's use of textisms when text messaging is positively related to improvement in literacy skills, especially spelling.     

The effects of mice and pull‐down menus versus command‐driven interfaces on writing

The effects of two different computer user interfaces on the process of writing are examined. English composition students (matched on computer experience) used a computer and keyboard (either with function keys or with a mouse) to write essays during their English classes. Essays generated using either a mouse or command‐driven interface were compared across different stages of writing. The impact of using a mouse versus command‐driven interface is described by analyzing the differences in the process used to create the essays and the quality of the essays produced by each group. Results indicate that students who used the command‐driven interface scored better on organization of the paper, creativity, number of supporting arguments, grammar/spelling, and letter grade than did their mouse counterparts, as perceived by graders. However, there were no significant differences between the two interface conditions on any grammatical indices.     

Motivational and cognitive benefits of training in immersive virtual reality based on multiple assessments

The main objective of this study was to examine the effectiveness of immersive virtual reality (VR) as a medium for delivering laboratory safety training. We specifically compare an immersive VR simulation, a desktop VR simulation, and a conventional safety manual. The sample included 105 first year undergraduate engineering students (56 females).  We include five types of learning outcomes including post‐test enjoyment ratings; pre‐ to post‐test changes in intrinsic motivation and self‐efficacy; a post‐test multiple choice retention test; and two behavioral transfer tests. Results indicated that the groups did not differ on the immediate retention test, suggesting that all three media were equivalent in conveying the basic knowledge. However, significant differences were observed favoring the immersive VR group compared to the text group on the two transfer tests involving the solving problems in a physical lab setting (d = 0.54, d = 0.57), as well as enjoyment (d = 1.44) and increases in intrinsic motivation (d = 0.69) and self‐efficacy (d = 0.60). The desktop VR group scored significantly higher than the text group on one transfer test (d = 0.63) but not the other (d= 0.11), as well as enjoyment (d =1.11) and intrinsic motivation (d =0.83).     

A simple learning environment improves mathematical reasoning

Abstract

ANIMATE, an interactive computer animation-based tutor, has been developed as part of an on-going test of a theory of word problem comprehension. Tutor feedback is unobtrusive and interpretive: unexpected behavior in the equation-driven animation of a situation highlights equation errors which the student resolves through iterative debugging. The student has responsibility for learning, goal-setting and diagnosis. Experimental controls (n = 96) with Motion problems show that improvement cannot be solely attributed to practice, computer use, or use of the situation-based method. Concurrent think-aloud protocols of students (n = 7) solving Motion, Work and Investment problems over two days (in a pretest-posttest design) uncover specific changes which underlie these improvements. ANIMATE is an effective problem-solving aid, and there is transfer of learning. Problems with impossible situations were acknowledged by median-level subjects (posttest scores between 77% and 85%), but solved blindly by high-level subjects (post test scores > = 95%), suggesting an automatically controlled processing dichotomy. On Day 2, subjects spent more time reviewing problem texts and correcting flawed expressions. They developed self-directed debugging skills, reminiscent of expert problem-solving in many domains, without relying on tutor feedback behaviors. The system is unintelligent by ITS standards but communicates knowledge to the students, helping them teach themselves approaches for mathematical problem-solving.     

Effects of real‐time visual feedback on pre‐service teachers' singing

This pilot study focuses on the use real‐time visual feedback technology (VFT) in vocal training. The empirical research has two aims: to ascertain the effectiveness of the real‐time visual feedback software ‘Sing & See’ in the vocal training of pre‐service music teachers and the teachers' perspective on their experience with VFT. Forty participants from an undergraduate music teacher education programme were randomly assigned to three groups. The first two groups were assigned the teacher and student versions of Sing & See, respectively, and the third group served as a control group without access to the software. The experimental groups were given 12 weeks to use the software for vocal training on a self‐regulated basis. The technique of complex selections (TCS) was designed to assess the pitch accuracy and richness of vocal timbre. Pre‐ and post‐test singing tasks showed that the participants from the experimental groups significantly improved their vocal timbre. A questionnaire survey conducted after the training period found that most of the participants in the experimental s were positive about the effectiveness of VFT software in vocal training. As future leaders in the implementation of music education technology, pre‐service music teachers expressed a positive attitude towards the use of VFT as a technology‐enhanced learning (TEL) component in music education.     

The effects of GBL and learning styles on Chinese idiom by using TUI device

This study investigated how the integration of a game‐based learning strategy and a tangible user interface (TUI) device improves the learning achievement of fifth‐grade students in studying Chinese idioms. By using the sifting, and sorting, features of Sifteo Cubes, learners, via a gaming situation, manually composed the cubes to the correct idioms, and the system also provided the origins of the idioms, facilitating meaningful learning. A quasi‐experimental non‐equivalent control‐group design was conducted. Both the experimental and control groups were administered a pre‐test and post‐test, the Idiom Learning Performance Test (ILPT), to investigate the variations between the treatment and groups. Furthermore, the Index of Learning Style for Youth (ILSY) survey was administered to determine how different learning styles and learning strategies affect learning achievement. The results showed that, after the CILS was used, the post‐test scores were significantly higher than the pre‐test scores in the experimental group. In addition, the post‐test scores of active and visual learners were higher than the pre‐test scores, and were significantly higher than reflective and verbal learners. The results suggested that the CILS is suitable for active and visual learners. Recommendations for using the CILS and Sifteo Cubes in instruction and further direction research are provided.     

Investigation and modeling of the structure of texting language

Language usage over computer mediated discourses, such as chats, emails and SMS texts, significantly differs from the standard form of the language and is referred to as texting language (TL). The presence of intentional misspellings significantly decrease the accuracy of existing spell checking techniques for TL words. In this work, we formally investigate the nature and type of compressions used in SMS texts, and develop a Hidden Markov Model based word-model for TL. The model parameters have been estimated through standard machine learning techniques from a word-aligned SMS and standard English parallel corpus. The accuracy of the model in correcting TL words is 57.7%, which is almost a threefold improvement over the performance of Aspell. The use of simple bigram language model results in a 35% reduction of the relative word level error rates.     

Investigating the use of ICT-based concept mapping techniques on creativity in literacy tasks

Abstract The key research question in this small‐scale study focuses on the effects that an ICT (information and communications technologies)‐based concept mapping intervention has on creativity and writing achievement in 10–11‐year‐old primary age pupils. The data shows that pupils using a concept mapping intervention significantly improve their NFER non‐verbal reasoning age‐standardised scores over a control group with a higher baseline whose scores remain constant. Evidence linking this with using ICT‐based concept mapping remains inconclusive. Correlation studies show that writing achievement and creativity are linked and that writing achievement and concept mapping connectivity are linked. However, there is no conclusive evidence for linking concept mapping connectivity with creativity. Findings show that concept mapping components increase post‐test and that concept mapping ability can be evaluated using a connectivity index that may have some predictive value in assessing writing achievement. The findings suggest that ICT‐based concept mapping provides a reliable framework from which to structure writing and that ICT enhances learning and use of this representational technique and provides opportunities for developing innovative and educationally valid practices.     

Effectiveness of feedback for enhancing English pronunciation in an ASR‐based CALL system

This paper presents a study on implementing the ASR‐based CALL (computer‐assisted language learning based upon automatic speech recognition) system embedded with both formative and summative feedback approaches and using implicit and explicit strategies to enhance adult and young learners' English pronunciation. Two groups of learners including 18 adults and 16 seventh graders participated in the study. The results indicate that the formative feedback had a positive impact on improving the learners' speaking articulation, and the summative feedback aided the learners' self‐reflection and helped them to track their speaking progress. Furthermore, the implicit information such as model pronunciation with full sentences and audio recast benefitted the adult learners, whereas the young learners preferred the explicit learning information such as textual information of individual words for self‐correction. In addition, the results of this study also confirm that learners have different perceptions of the media modalities designed with implicit and explicit strategies in the feedback. Feedback with audio modality is more suitable for adults, whereas juxtaposed textual and audio modalities are better for young learners.