What is the role of automated writing assessment in ELT?

Whenever I share a link to some form of tool that helps students or teachers to evaluate writing skills, it is inevitable that within a few hours I'll get a comment from somebody saying "I typed in xxxx error and [enter whatever tool you wish here] didn't spot it or correct it." Usually, the sentence with the error in is complete gibberish and one that a teacher would instantly see as such but one which can sometimes fool computer-based assessment software for exactly that reason. Gibberish can be very difficult to correct.

Having said that though we all know from spelling and grammar checking that all digital tools for the assessment and correction of writing still lack the judgement and expertise of experienced writing teacher and most will always miss something or spot something that turns out not to be an error. I have, however, found the same to be true of human markers. Especially when faced with piles of essay assignments to mark after a long day in the classroom, people make mistakes too. Interestingly, The Educational Testing Service in New Jersey has been working on an e-Rater system to automate admission test scoring.  They have concluded that a human rating combined with an automatic rating is more reliable than two human raters since humans tend to diverge in their judgements.

So the question is: If these tools are fallible can they still be pedagogically useful?

For me, the answer would be yes. What this means though is that we need to teach our students to use these tools in combination with and to develop their own powers of judgement to become more independent learners. Let's be clear that doesn't just mean independent from the teacher but also free from the dependence on writing support tools.

Whenever I work with any kind of writing support tools I'm reminded of an episode of the sitcom Friends in which the character Joey needs to write a formal letter and discovers that using a digital thesaurus can make the words he uses sound more intelligent.

• You can watch the clip here to see the outcome: The Thesaurus

What this highlights is that teachers and students need to work with these tools with a clear understanding of their limitations and a need to develop and use their own judgement when deciding whether to take the advice of the program.

Personally, I think this makes for a great classroom activity. If you can get a text with a variety of mistakes and different feedback suggestions from the online tool that students want to use, then you can get the students to evaluate the feedback and try to decide how accurate and useful they think it is. This is a great way to get students thinking more critically about language and encouraging them to reflect on their own writing. Once they are familiar with the tool, students should write their own essays and use the tool again to get feedback on their draft.

As time progresses though I'm sure these various writing support tools will continue to develop and evolve into better versions of themselves. Through the use of AI and machine learning, computers are becoming much better at understanding context and its connection to the use of language. This is particularly true when the computer has a clear framework understanding of what the student needs to achieve.

• A great example of this is the Film Review Analysis tool on the Virtual Writing Tutor site

This tool gives students clear guidelines and rubric for what they need to write and then measures their input against those criteria. This narrows down the risk of error and enables the program to give very detailed feedback on the various criteria the assignment is being marked against. The program then checks:

• for a question at the beginning of the introduction
• thesis and topic sentence strength to help students strengthen their claims
• the count of citations in body paragraphs to encourage students to use evidence to support their arguments
• thesis reformulation in the conclusion to promote paraphrasing as contextualized skill
• literary and film analysis vocabulary scores to encourage students to increase the active range of their vocabulary

The other great strength of these tools have over teachers of course is time. A digital platform like Grammar.ly or https://virtualwritingtutor.com can handle tens of thousands of texts each minute and students can keep coming back to them with written work every hour if they need to, whereas teacher-marking-time is expensive and very definitely finite and I would  be surprised if on average a teacher marks more than one or two pieces of written work from each student in a week.

With demands on teacher time growing and the capabilities of automated writing support improving all the time, I feel these tools can deliver an increasingly important contribution to the development of our students writing skills.

You can find links to many more resources like this and activities for the digital classroom in my ebooks at: https://payhip.com/peacheypublications

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Nik Peachey

The Virtual Writing Tutor - A Suite of Tools for Developing Students’ Writing

For tech-savvy students there are many ways to get their grammar checked, from online grammar checkers to the inbuilt grammar checks that they can find in MS Word or Apple’s Pages, so in order for another grammar checker to be useful, it needs to do more than just check grammar, and that’s what the Virtual Writing Tutor offers.

The Virtual Writing Tutor is more than a simple grammar checker, it is a suite of tools and activities that you can use with your students to help them improve their writing.

• On the home page, there is a standard field where students can enter their text and get the usual kinds of feedback and analysis, such as word counts, vocabulary checks and punctuation checks.

• When the students click on grammar check, they get a list of their errors with explanations. They can also get the explanations translated if they are lower levels.

• Another nice feature is that they can actually hear their text spoken using text to speech and even download the audio file, so this is useful for helping to support pronunciation skills too.

Across the navigation menu at the top of the site, there are also some interesting features.

The Games section has an error correction game that shows students a number of random sentences with errors that they have to correct. Once they have corrected the sentence they click on ‘Help’ and this will give them some feedback on whether they have corrected the sentence.

• There is also a ‘My error game’ which uses errors from the student’s own texts in the game, so if students are registered users and regularly using the site it also becomes a great way to review and try to eradicate regular errors.

Another interesting feature is the IELTS section. In this section, students can practice answering IELTS writing test questions. These tests include a timer so that students are working under test type conditions and when they have finished, they can get some feedback on their answer and an estimated band score.

• The feedback is informative and tells the students the kinds of words and structure the examiner would be looking for. There is also some grammar feedback on the text the students entered.

The Pen Pals section of the site also looks really interesting. Using this, teachers are able to set up and manage their class and using some example templates to manage a range of tasks. The VWT then handles giving the students feedback, correction, and a score, so this is a huge time saver for teachers who want to do this kind of writing exchange.

• Find out more about this at: A Pen Pal Exchange for Communicative Writing Practice

Last but not least, there is a section of the site for developing Hypertext Narrative. These are the kinds of texts where students read about a situation and then have choices. Their choices can guide their path through the narrative which can have a number of different final outcomes.

• Using this part of the site teacher or students can easily construct their own hypertext narratives using simple editing tool. You can also access a number of texts that have already been written, so this might be a good place to go to introduce your students to the concept or to find some content for your lessons.

• Example Hypertext Narratives

As with most grammar checkers, The Virtual Writing Tutor looks like it’s still a work in process and the analysis of writing isn’t always going to be perfect, but this looks like a great suite of tools to try out and to keep an eye as there are obviously lots of good ideas here.

You can find links to many more tools like this and activities for the digital classroom in my ebooks at: https://payhip.com/peacheypublications

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Epigrammar - Making assignment marking quick and collaborative

If you have a lot of student assignments to mark, and especially if many of them have been handed in on paper, then Epigrammar is going to be a great tool for you.

Epigrammar has been designed to take a lot of the sweat and monotonous repetition out of homework marking. Basically, what Epigrammar does is enable you to create classes for your students where you or they can upload their homework assignments and you can add comments to them. That doesn’t sound so unusual, but Epigrammar can also allow you to create a bank of comments that you can reuse so that you aren’t having to write the same thing over.

Another great feature of Epigrammar is that it isn’t restricted to text type documents, so if your student has done their homework on paper or even if their homework is a sketch or painting, you or they can take a picture of it, upload it to the platform and then you can add comments and marks.

Another nice feature of Epigrammar is that you can make some assignments ‘shared’ so that students can see what their peers have uploaded and even add their own comments and suggestions.

The other great time saver though is that at the end of the term or semester when it’s time to write up a report about your students’ work, Epigrammar can automatically generate suggestions for these based on the comments you have made on their written work. Then all you have to do is drag and drop in the ones you want to use and edit them.

To get started, you just need to register and then set up a homeroom. Once your homeroom is created you can generate an invitation code and students can then use this to register on the site. This code adds them to your class.

You can then either share documents for them to comment on, or they can upload their work to the site for you or their peers to comment on.

Comments are added by dropping coloured pins on the document and then writing in and saving to the right of the screen.

All of these comments then become visible to the student(s) on the left of the screen.

Here’s a link to a video tutorial that goes into more depth on the process of generating reports: https://epigrammar-1.wistia.com/medias/xrw1lvexa7

It’s clear that the more you use Epigrammar the more time it is likely to save you and the more efficient the whole process will become. A bonus feature of the site is that you and your students will also be creating a form of e-portfolio that will enable you and students to look back over their work and assess progress.

Epigrammar has a free subscription which should enable you to test it out with a group of students, but to be useable at scale you will need to subscribe. The price though seems very reasonable when comparing to the value of your time and the amount of it you are likely to save by using the platform for all your marking.

I hope you and your students enjoy using Epigrammar and that it doesn't just save you time, but also increases the overall impact of your marking.

You can find more tools like this and advice on how to train teacher to use them in my ebook.


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I hope you find it useful.

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Nik Peachey

Using Fake Text Messages to Create Learning Activities

iFake Text Message is a great tool for creating authentic looking materials to engage students and shift materials design into a genre that’s both relevant and familiar. The tool enables you to create a screen image of a text conversation.

Creating a fake text is easy just go to: https://ifaketextmessage.com/

Type your message into the field on the left and you will see it appear on the screen on the right.

Then just add more text and build your conversation.

You can customise most of the features of the screen to make it look more authentic.

When you have finished just click on the ‘Create Image’ button. You can then download it and add it to your materials.

Here are a few ways you can use this with students

Gapped dialogues - Create gapped dialogues and see if your students can work out what goes in the gaps.

Conversation starters - Create the beginning of a conversation and get your students to work in pairs to continue it (They can create the next screen using https://ifaketextmessage.com/).

Dialogue rebuild - Create a longer conversation that takes 4 to 5 screens, then give your students the screen images and ask them to put them in order.

Reported speech - Use a screen image to practise reported speech. Students have to report what they read in the conversation.

Famous conversations - Get your students to think of two famous people and then create a dialogue between them.

Finding errors - Recycle some of your students’ common errors by putting them into text conversations. Then get the students to try to find and correct the errors.

Exploring cyber-bullying - Create a collection of screens that students can look at and decide whether they constitute harassment and discuss how they should respond.

Writing prompt - Create the beginning of a dialogue from a horror / romance or even sci-fi story. Get the students to continue the story.

Vocabulary record - Give the students 3 - 4 new words they have been learning and ask them to create a dialogue that includes the words.

Shakespeare as SMS - Use https://transl8it.com/ to translate a few lines from a Shakespeare play into texting language and see if your students can decode them.

I hope you enjoy these ideas and think of others to use with your students. 

 

 

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Nik Peachey - Pedagogical Director - PeacheyPublications Ltd

 

 

Develop Critical Thinking Skills with Kialo

Kialo is a wonderful tool for developing critical thinking skills and to develop students’ abilities to look at and explore multiple perspectives of complex issues in a clear and logical way.

The site enables teachers to set up complex topics and structure ‘pros and cons’ type debates around them.

This is simple to do. Just set up your topic, add an image and some explainer text that you want students to read first and then invite students to add either pros or cons.

You can keep your debate topics private and only allow your own students to add to them by creating teams and then sharing different discussions with the team, or once you have 15 comments you can then publish them and open them up to the public. This process of collecting a reasonable number of comments before going public helps to ensure the quality and integrity of the discussion content already on the site.

Once you have created a team you can also share any of the existing debates with your students too.

This is a great place to get your students thinking in a structured and logical way about complex topics and is a great way to prepare them for a classroom debate or discussion.

The discussions have been categorised into topics to make them easier to browse. A lot of the existing content has a very strong US bias, but there are still quite a few internationally relevant topics if you don’t want to create your own.

I hope you enjoy using Kialo and your students find it rewarding. 

 

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Nik Peachey

10 Tools & Resources for Developing Writing Skills

Over the last couple of months I've found and written about a number of really great tools and resources to help improve our students' writing skills. This is a collection of links to reviews of ten of the best.

1. Free Reading Passages and Progress Tracking Tools

This site was designed to help grade K5 - K12 native speaker students develop their reading and comprehension skills, but can also be really useful for second language development. Students can choose from a range of graded texts and get a wide range of interactive activities and reading support. Teachers can also register on the site and assign specific texts to their students.
Read more

2. Using Image Prompts to Inspire Writing & Speaking Activities

As a teacher you can create classes and assign writing tasks to students. The students do their writing tasks within the platform and can publish and share them there. This is a little like posting to a blog, but within a safe environment.
Read more

3. Improve Writing Skills with Peer Evaluation

Getting students to peer evaluate can be a real organisational challenge in the classroom, but now it looks like there is a simple technological solution. Peergrade is a great tool to get students assessing each others’ work and giving each other feedback.Read more

4. Writing & Discussion Activities to Promote Awareness of Fake News

Newspaper Generator is a useful tool that enables you to create what looks like a newspaper front page. To do this you upload an image, select a title and a headline and then write in the details of the story. Then just click on 'Make it' and the site will produce a PDF that you can download
Read more

5. Collaborative Story Writing for the BYOD Classroom

This app is based around a common classroom activity in which students write stories together by adding a sentence and passing it on to another writer. The next writer then adds a sentence and either passes it back or passes it to another student. The process continues until the story is finished.
Read more

6. A Tool to Encourage Students to Self-Correct & Improve their Writing

SAS Writing Reviser is a really cleverly designed Chrome Add-on to get your students self-assessing and improving their own writing. Once installed you can open a document in Google Docs and then decide what aspects of your writing you would like to improve.Read more

7. Illustrate Poems & Create Short Image Based Narrative

This app is also social so users can comment on, follow and like each others creations.I used the app to create an illustration of a poem by Robert Frost - Fire & Ice. This would be nice activity to do with students, either selecting or letting them select a poem to illustrate.
Read more

8. Creating Text Adventures to Develop Reading & Writing Skills

Text adventure games are a great way of really engaging students in reading. They get the chance to take some control of the narrative and find their own way through the story by making choices at various points in the narrative.
Read more

9. Get Teens Writing with Gamified Writing Activities

Story Wars is a great gamified way to make writing creative and competitive.
Students read short chapters of the beginnings of stories and then have to submit the next chapter for the story. The readers of the story can then vote for which new chapter they feel is the best continuation of the story. The one with the most votes becomes part of the story.
Read more

10. Give Young Learners Structured Writing Practice with WritingSparks

This is a great site for giving structure and adding an element of fun to writing activities, especially if you have a data projector so that students can see the prompts on the screen.
Read more

I hope you find these reviews useful and that they help you to choose the right tools and resources to help your students.

Get lesson plans, teaching tips and teacher resource books with our Teachers' Classroom App.

 

 

Nik Peachey - Pedagogical Director - PeacheyPublications Ltd

Improve Writing Skills with Peer Evaluation

Getting students to peer evaluate can be a real organisational challenge in the classroom, but now it looks like there is a simple technological solution. Peergrade is a great tool to get students assessing each others’ work and giving each other feedback.

You can create classes and then assign digital assignments that can include a range of different media. These assignments are then sent to students.

The students then complete and submit their tasks online. Once they have submitted their assignment they then grade the assignments of their peers. You can decide on how many peer assignments they have to grade.

After they have graded their peers they are able to find the feedback from their peers on their own work.

As the teacher you can set up rubrics for the students to use when they grade each others' work.

The platform also has a live session mode that enables you to do writing work in the live connected classroom.

Peergrade looks like a really excellent tool to encourage a process approach to writing and to encourage students to think more deeply about how their work is evaluated and what they should be aiming to achieve.

The basic account is free and unlimited. If you want to use this regularly and especially if you want to implement the use of it across your school then it's well worth checking of the other subscription models as it's very reasonably priced and helping to support apps like this is more likely to ensure they continue to develop.

You can find links to many more tools like this and activities for the digital classroom in my ebooks at: https://peacheypublications.com/. All my ebooks are available for iOS and as PDF.

Sign up for my twice monthly free newsletter and get a free copy of Digital Tools for Teachers at: Free Sign Up

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• 20 Tech Enhanced Activities for the Language Classroom
• Digital Tools for Teachers
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• Exploiting Infographics
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Nik Peachey

Exploit Interactive Digital Narrative for Language Development

Draw a Stickman site has a collection of short narratives about a Stickman that you can draw with your mouse.

Once you have drawn the man you click a button and he comes to life.

You then follow him through a short adventure and draw in various elements as he needs them and discover what happens to him.

There are three free adventures that students can work through or you can use them in class with a data projector.

These are really imaginative adventures that can inspire students’ creativity.

Draw a Stickman can be used for lots of activities including retelling the story, writing the next chapter of the story or just predicting what will happen as the adventures unfold.

You can find links to many more tools like this and activities for the digital classroom in my ebooks at: http://peacheypublications.com/. All my ebooks are available for iOS and as PDF.

Sign up for my twice monthly free newsletter and get a free copy of Digital Tools for Teachers at: https://tinyletter.com/technogogy/ 

Related links:

• 20 Tech Enhanced Activities for the Language Classroom
• Digital Tools for Teachers
• Thinking Critically through Digital Media
• Exploiting Infographics
• 10 Lessons in Digital Literacy
• Digital Video – A Manual for Language Teachers 

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Nik Peachey

Using Image Prompts to Inspire Writing & Speaking Activities

This site is built around the concept of using image prompts to inspire digital writing activities for students.

Photo by HB Mertz on Unsplash

As a teacher you can create classes and assign writing tasks to students. The students do their writing tasks within the platform and can publish and share them there. This is a little like posting to a blog, but within a safe environment.

Students can comment on each other's postings and collect them into a gallery. The site also has an interesting tool to add voice recordings, so you can use this for speaking activities too.

The site is free to use with up to 40 students, and they can produce up to 5 postings each. After that you have to have a premium account, but it is very reasonably priced, especially if you choose the whole school solution.

You can also access the writing prompts without signing up by going to: https://www.writeabout.com/ideas/

WriteAbout is a really useful tool to get ideas for student writing projects.

Get lesson plans, teaching tips and teacher resource books with our Teachers' Classroom App.

 

 

Nik Peachey - Pedagogical Director - PeacheyPublications Ltd