Communicative language pedagogy calls on teachers to maximize the number of meaningful messages with a focus on form to help students acquire the language. In the classroom, that means lots of speaking and listening practice using target structures, but because of the amount of time it takes to correct students' writing, teachers tend not to ask students to write very much or very often.
In order to implement the proposals of Communicative Language Teaching more fully, finding ways to maximize opportunities for feedback on writing without overloading themselves with correction work is a current concern for many teachers. Peer-feedback, self-correction, MS Word spell checker use are all being tried with limited success.
My Solution
I have been developing a free online grammar, punctuation, and spell checker for the past 5 years. It started off as tool that I used only with my students, but as it got better and better at catching errors I decided to make it free and accessible to anyone in the world.
Currently, it has these features:
- check spelling
- check grammar, punctuation, and word choice
- check vocabulary (academic/conversational words, field-related words, cliches, power-words)
- paraphrase checker (enter your paraphrase and the original text to compare for similarities)
- speech recognition to test pronunciation
- text-to-speech to model pronunciation (great for oral presentations)
- error correction game to practice self-correction
My questions for teachers like you are as follows:
- Do you have experience using online grammar checkers with students?
- Would you like to try using an online grammar checker?
- What was the biggest problem you faced using an online grammar checker with your students?
- Assuming grammar checkers could made more reliable, what would be the best way to implement them in a course?