SHEEZA ALTAF

ROLL NO#210104
MPHIL MORNING
2021-2023
COMPUTER ASSISTED LANGUAGE LEARNING
CHAPTER#6
TECHNOLOGY AND L2 WRITING
Technology and L2 Learning:

New information and communication technologies are altering writing

practices in important ways.
As Relles and Tierney (2013) put it,
“the integration of communication technologies with academic
culture suggests that the writing habits of tomorrow’s students will
be navigational across myriad discourse situations that do and will
yet exist”

Example
• Students in fourth grade, for example, while still working on writing sentences,
may be routinely asked to go beyond traditional writing tasks to put together
PowerPoint slides, collages, or contribute text to blogs.
• High school students, while drafting persuasive essays, may be tasked with
writing Facebook or Twitter posts. College students continue to write lab reports
but also need to construct multimodal compositions that include both text and
visuals. Successful business people must be able to write communications to be
disseminated through a variety of social media.
 WAVE OF TECHNOLOGY AFFECTING WRITING
PRACTICES

• In this context, all teachers, schools, and colleges are challenged to

respond to the changing nature of writing (Herrington and Moran 2009).
• Fortunately, the same wave of technologies affecting writing practices
provides a wealth of tools for the teaching of second or foreign language
writing.
• Such tools have been adopted by business and education to improve the
teaching and learning of writing.
 CATEGORIES OF TECHNOLOGIES FOR L2
WRITING
• The wide variety of technologies for L2 writing can be divided into three general categories.PuproseThe
most general purpose of the three is the Web 2.0 application, which allows for authorship of multiple users
who contribute content to a common repository online.
• Second category
The second category is automated writing evaluation systems developed specifically for analysis and feedback
to writers during the writing process.
• Third category
The third category is the corpus‐based tools, which serve as a reference to writers as they strategically examine
the language used in collections of existing electronic texts. Many software tools exemplify each of these
categories, but we have chosen a few to illustrate the affordances offered writers by tools of each of the three
types.
WEB 2.0 APPLICATIONS :

• Web 2.0 tools include the variety of social media sites, such as Facebook and
Twitter, as well as blogs.

• For L2 learners, these sites provide unprecedented opportunities to

experiment with their language in settings where their language appears
before and communicates with real audiences rather than being confined to
communication for practice within the language classroom.
 GOOGLE DOCS
• The use of language for communication, rather than for practice alone, is a core goal of most language
instruction.
• Beyond opportunities for communication, Web 2.0 applications like Google Docs provide the tools for
collaborative writing.Google Docs, is a free online word processor within Google Drive, an office suite
developed by Google Inc.
• Users need a Google account to create, edit, and share Google Docs files. Google Docs features a full ‐fledged
word processor with an easy ‐to ‐use text ‐editing interface.
• Compared to traditional word processing software, Google Docs is unique in its capability for real ‐time
collaboration, including editing, commenting, and chatting by and among multiple users on a shared file.
• Additionally, the composing and revision history on Google Docs is automatically saved and a record of the
entire composing process is available for review.
• A completed piece of writing can be published online or downloaded in different file formats, including
Microsoft Word, pdf, plain text, html page, and so on. As a collaborative writing platform, Google Docs has
gained popularity in language teaching classrooms at all levels.
 LANG‐8 (HTTP://LANG‐8.COM/)
• Is a good example of a social networking site designed to encourage L2 communication by
creating a community where language learners are matched with native speakers of target
languages.
• Each member can contribute to the virtual language learning community by writing posts in the
language they are learning and giving feedback or making corrections to other members’ written
posts in his or her native or stronger language.
• With a few buttons for editing, such as color changing and crossing out, users can easily correct
or edit others’ posts on Lang‐8.
• Lang‐8 rewards active users with “L” points, which help make their posts more visible to
proficient users, thus increasing the probability that they will receive feedback or corrections.
AUTOMATED WRITING EVALUATION

• NLP technologies have become sufficiently widespread that a number of these

systems have been developed, although because of the substantial resources
required to develop them, they are typically not freely available on the Internet.
Widely Used AWE Systems:
• Criterion
• Turnitin
• Writing Pal .
CRITERION (HTTP://WWW.ETS.ORG/CRITERION/)

• It is a web‐based commercial writing evaluation and feedback tool developed by Educational Testing
Service (ETS, 2015).
• Criterion targets the writing instruction both in K‐12 programs and higher education and provides a
holistic score and feedback based on level‐specific models considering both the age and proficiency
levels of the learners.
• Building on e‐rater, an automated scoring engine, Criterion is capable of providing holistic scores (1–
4 or 1–6 points) to the essays written to its own prompts.
• In addition, detailed diagnostic trait feedback, in a mixture of both direct and indirect feedback
formats, is available in five categories: grammar usage, mechanics, style and organization, and
development.
• Beside the holistic score and individualized feedback, it provides resources such as an essay planning
tool and the Writer’s Handbook at different levels for students to understand and evaluate the feedback
provided
 TURNITIN (HTTP://TURNITIN.COM/)
• was initially launched as an online plagiarism prevention service by iParadigms, LLC, in 1997.
• Recently, through partnering with or acquiring other companies, iParadigms added more functions
to Turnitin and transformed it from an originality‐checking tool to a comprehensive platform of
online automated grading and peer review (Turnitin, 2015).
• For example, Turnitin has integrated e‐rater, the automated scoring engine developed by ETS as
well as LightSide Labs’ LightSide Revision Assistant to enhance its grammar checking and
assessment function.
• In addition, Turnitin facilitates teacher feedback by providing frequently used comments and
rubrics as well as a voice commenting tool.
• Turnitin can be integrated with mainstream learning management systems (LMS), such as
Blackboard Learn, Moodle, Canvas, and so on
W-PAL:

• Writing Pal or W‐Pal is an automated intelligent tutoring system (ITS) developed by the Science of
Learning and Educational Technology (SoLET) Lab at Arizona State University.
• W‐Pal’s intended users are native English‐speaking students in high schools. However, English
language learners in high school and college freshmen have also been included in some empirical
studies of W‐Pal in the United States.
• Unlike other AWE tools, W‐Pal is designed as a writing strategy instruction tool based on four
principles for teaching writing, namely, strategy instruction, modularity, extended practice, and
formative feedback (Roscoe and McNamara 2013).
• Accordingly, W‐Pal provides eight animated learning modules covering the typical writing process,
including writing strategies used in the pre‐writing phase, drafting phase, and the revision phase
COH‐METRIX

• a system developed for computing cohesion in the written and spoken texts by the
Institute for Intelligent Systems at the University of Memphis–and other text analysis
tools.

BENIFITS OF USING Web 2.0 APPLICATIONS:

• The benefits of using Web 2.0 applications for peer review in particular are well
documented by Chen (2014), who carried out an interpretive synthesis of 20 empirical
studies on technology‐mediated peer feedback published from 1990 to 2019
TECHNOLOGIES INVOLVED IN THESE
STUDIES

• The technologies involved in these studies include synchronous and

asynchronous tools, such as email, course management systems, blog
websites, online forums, real‐time communication software, and Microsoft
Word.
• In general, technology‐supported peer feedback is characterized by
motivating interaction, flexible discourse patterns and language usages, and
effective shifts in teachers’ and students’ roles in the process of providing
peer feedback.
L2 WRITING AND CORPUS BASES
TECHNOLOGIES
Data Driven Learning Approach
• Garner (2013) examined the effects of a data‐driven learning approach on ESL undergraduate students’ use
of linking adverbials.
• Two data‐driven learning activities were designed as treatments: (1) indirect corpus use by showing a
concordance line and short context reading, and (2) direct corpus consultation using the COCA and the
Michigan analysis of pre‐ and post‐treatment essays produced by the students in a control and a treatment
group.
• Garner (2013) found that the students in the treatment groups used more academic linking adverbials with a
higher accuracy in their post‐treatment essay, compared with the students in the control group, who received
traditional instruction on linking adverbials.
GOOGLE CUSTOM SEARCH:

• For example, Park (2012) followed three Chinese undergraduates in an academic

English writing class at a U.S. university and analyzed their use of Google’s Custom
Search on a corpus of academic texts, based on screen recordings, oral and written
reflections, and student essays.
• Analysis revealed that the students were active in solving language issues through
“retrieving, evaluating, and appropriating search results from the corpus” (Park 2012,
380), Park highlighted the importance of evaluating and analyzing query results on
the students’ part, which calls for careful learner training in L2 writing classes
 PRE FABRICATED EXPRESSION ORGANIZER
TOOL:
• Chen et al. (2015) built a paraphrasing tool called PREFabricated Expression Recognizer
(PREFER) based on an English‐Chinese parallel corpus using natural language
processing technique and machine translation.
• According to Chen et  al. (2015), PREFER features a multiword search and multiple
types of output, including a list of paraphrases in English and Chinese, usage pattern, and
example sentences.
• The utility of PREFER was investigated with 55 Chinese‐speaking learners of English in
a pre‐ and post‐test design.
• Results suggest that students’ paraphrasing performance improved and that students
preferred this tool over online dictionaries and a thesaurus for paraphrasing purposes.
WEB-BASED CONCORDANCING PROGRAM:

• Bloch (2009) reported a design of a web ‐based concordancing program which is

specialized for learning and choosing reporting verbs in academic writing.
• This online tool is designed to enable users to customize their queries regarding the
functional features or rhetorical impact of reporting verbs.
• The output includes suggested reporting verbs, as well as sample sentences based on a
search in an academic writing corpus.
• These two tools exemplify the advantages of combining corpus analysis and online
technology for teaching writing and hint at technologies to come.
CONCLUSION

• This chapter reviewed the three major categories of technologies, namely Web 2.0
applications, AWE, and corpus‐based tools.
• These new technologies are shaping how L2 writing is practiced and taught.
Therefore, language teachers should be open to the development of new technologies
that have the potential to assist L2 writing.
• Openness in this domain means that L2 writing teachers are expected to experience
these technologies themselves and then to make critical evaluation of the
technologies for their utility in L2 writing context
Thank You 