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Re: [school-discuss] English teacher apps



Dennis Daniels wrote:
> Quite possibly. There are many things that teachers still do better than
> computers. A computer might be a good replacement for a bad teacher, but
> it is rarely even close to a good one.

Yes, I agree, however, but the good teachers can be made great by applying the tools that help the teachers better analyze an entire group's needs. I'm looking for apps that help remove the drudgery of pointing out that ending a sentence with a preposition is bad form, that one must start a sentence with a capital letter and if you make a spelling mistake it is the student's responsibility to correct it.

I was driving home this evening and could think of scripts, off the top of my head, that would make all English teacher's lives much more productive...

*histogram of all words a student uses diffed against the Academic Word List
*a search that isolates and meta tags all items found in the style report
*a script that reads the target vocab list and verifies that those words appear in student's paper
*a script that verifies that students are not finishing their sentences with a preposition

Those don't sound too hard. The last one would give a lot of false positives, since there are plenty of cases where a preposition might be a suitable word to end a sentence with. (OK, that last sentence wasn't a good example!)

I like the histogram idea, but that's beyond my programming capabilities. It shouldn't be too hard for someone familiar with Perl/Tk, though. Basically ...

1. Make arrays containing each sublist of the AWL.
2. Make a hash with the keys being the sublists.
3. Read the essay, searching for each element of each array, and incrementing the value in the hash when found.
4. Divide the hash values by the number of words in the essay and multiply by a suitable number.
5. Print the results as a histogram.

Robin



--
"I'm very into Britney Spears' early work, before she sold out, so mostly her, um, finger painting and macaroni art."
Dawn - BtVS

Robin Turner
IDMYO
Bilkent Universitesi
Ankara 06533
Turkey

www.bilkent.edu.tr/~robin