I’ve written a lot about my ongoing search for a helpful an online site that would help all students, and particularly English Language Learners, develop their writing – one that would have model essays, graphic organizers, accessible explanations of errors, etc. Though none have met my hopes, I have collected some that try at The Best Online Tools That Can Help Students Write An Essay.
In my ideal site, teachers would also have access to student first drafts. If we don’t, then we likely wouldn’t see many common errors in our students writing – it might be possible that students correct errors pointed out by the program without any real understanding of why the error was made and the rule behind its correction. That’s just one of many issues I have with computer grading of essays (see The Best Posts On Computer-Graded Essays).
This all brings me to the new – and free – Cambridge English Write & Improve site.
It’s very easy to use – student just copy and paste what they’ve written and, within seconds, the site will give you feedback on writing mechanics. I was very impressed with the quality of the feedback – it caught many essays and, even more surprisingly, offered accurate alternatives. The quality of the feedback the site gives is tons better than the feedback a writer would get from, let’s say, Microsoft Word.
A big problem, however, is that, though the feedback appears to very accurate, it give no explanation of why the word choice might be incorrect. So a student would write an essay with many errors corrected, but I wouldn’t know what those errors were and wouldn’t know if the student understood the reasons why they were errors.
Of course, one huge advantage to students using this tool would be that teachers could concentrate on the “big picture” of student writing and not have to pay as much attention to spelling, grammar and punctuation basics. That might make it more suitable to higher-intermediate, advanced and English-proficient students who, with luck, will have made it past many of those kinds of mistakes.
Some of my concerns would be alleviated if the error explanations were more clear or, at the very least, included a link where a student could learn more about the concepts.
I’m also confused by the “notebook” set-up of the site. You can create “notebooks” with assignments for others in a closed group, but it’s unclear to me how the “owner” of the notebook can access members’ writing, or if that’s even possible. If it is doable, that would make it more attractive to teachers.
What do you think? Do you have suggestions for ways to deal with my concerns?
Thanks to CASLS & EFL Classroom 2.0 for the tip.
ADDENDUM: See a comment left by the site’s creator in response to this post.
Larry,
I’m Paul Butcher, co-founder and CTO of English Language iTutoring, the company behind Write & Improve.
Thank you so much for taking the time to look at Write & Improve, and writing up your impressions. I’m really pleased to hear that you were impressed by the quality of the feedback—you won’t be surprised to hear that we’ve invested a *huge* amount of effort in ensuring that the feedback is accurate, so it’s great that all that effort seems to have paid off. Our focus is very different from a tool like the grammar checker in Word, or Grammarly. They are intended to help you fix your writing. We’re trying to give learners pedagogically sound feedback which allows them to focus their efforts where there’s the most to be gained, without telling them all the answers. We hope to engage learners in making the editorial
decisions for themselves and to train them to become good reviewers of their own work.
Write & Improve has always been intended as a teaching aid, not a replacement for teachers. As you say above, our hope is that we will free teachers up from the “grunt work” and allow them to focus on the “big picture”.
Thank you also for the constructive criticism in your post. Write & Improve is under very active development, and we have a number of things planned that will go a considerable way towards addressing the points you raise. In particular, we plan to significantly expand the functionality of Write & Improve’s Workbooks to allow precisely the kind of teacher access to students’ writing, including early drafts, that you mention. We expect this to be available early next year.
Thanks, Paul! I added a direct link in my post to your comment.
hello Larry, I totally agree with your opinion that the feedbacks are really fast and quite accurate. Also, there’s wide range of topics for students to practice and helps students to build up a writing habit. But the website will never truly help students to improve their writing since the machine can not understand the essay. I only see the feedback helps me with my pronunciation and sometimes the style but it’s still a machine. W&I is amazing in some ways but it’s not really the best choice to improve writing skills.
Good Morning Paul,
You have done a brilliant brainstorming to build such an outstanding website.
However, I think out of the four criteria of evaluation as per the IELTS standards you can add the code to provide result in all like a scorecard, I understand maybe task response will not be that accurate. so that a person knows exactly the reason why they lack and how to improve. If you need assistance I can help I am into software development services.
I used the website and find it amazing as you don’t have to wait for someone to tell you what is the scorecard. I hope you understood my concerns and will enhance the software feature to help your potential users.
Wish you a nice weekend ahead.
Yours sincerely,
AM
I really like the free version. It gives the lower level students a lot of practice. I tried the paid version and I was a bit disappointed. First of all they require you to pay several dollars per student per month. I guess for a few places that may be ok where the school will pay that subscription on an ongoing basis. I teach at a university. For me that is impractical and impossible. The STUDENTS need to pay for it for a limited time like a semester for a specific writing or general course. Lots of other online services sell cards with codes to solve this problem. I was still curious so I spent my research money. They had a real problem accepting money for a specific set of time rather than on an ongoing basis. I wrote feedback to my students and gave them grades but they could never see them. The staff were nice but they couldn’t fix it. The information in the class view looks great but when you try to use it for a class I find it kind of convoluted. I need a simple section/tab with my class list and a mark for each assignment from me or from the system. As it is I get a jumble of drafts out of order. The charts look good but they are not that helpful. I think they need to consult with some active classroom teachers to find out what teachers really need in various environments. The base technology is really good so I hope they improve the organization.