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Re: [school-discuss] English teacher apps



On Tue, 01 Jun 2004 18:27:41 -0700, Dennis Daniels <ddaniels@magic.fr> 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.

A more general application of that would be an open-source
grammar/style checker. Microsoft Word has a grammar checker that also
looks at things like academic word usage -- although unfortunately
it's also rather unreliable.

I believe Abiword was trying to integrate the Link Grammar system as a
grammar-checking tool, and Link Grammar recently adopted a more
liberal license. It won't handle style issues like awkward wording,
word misuse, or academic style, since it's more of a rule-based
tagging system, but I think those could be handled separately.

However, as a student, I don't like the idea of any sort of automated
grading. Or even just when teachers assign points based on how many
times you use certain words that they're looking for. My writing
teacher pointed out that it's easy to throw around a bunch of terms
without really understanding what they mean. You could imagine a
situation where a student says that a person had a "profit motive" and
gets more points than a student that clearly shows that he/she knows
what it means, but fails to use the appropriate "target vocab".

But that's an extreme example. Good word lists might state that
"consequently " is a good supporting word and "evidently" is weak, and
bring that to the teacher's and student's attention for learning
purposes -- not used for grading. I would be very wary of using word
lists specific to a particular topic for the reason listed above and
the fact that students will probably come up with a wide range of
arguments that the teacher may not have thought of.

I don't like the idea of a histogram, because that tends to lean
towards grading/evaluation and says nothing about the specific context
in which the words are used. I'd rather see a circle around
"evidently" with a comment like "'evidently' is not a good word choice
because it suggests to the reader that you did not expect the findings
of the study (...)" -- thanks to my writing teacher for that example,
although I know I'm not describing it very well here. I'll see the
note, fix it in my rough draft, and hopefully not make that mistake
again. If I get back my final draft and it just says that I got docked
X points for having lousy style, that's not going to teach me
anything.

Even if the teacher points out all the errors on the final copy, I
probably won't care anymore -- so the rough draft is the best place to
point such things out. And even if the teacher warned me that
"evidently" was not a good word choice, the final draft should still
be graded by the teacher on the basis of how strong the argument
really is, not because some people think that "evidently" is a poor
word choice.

Hope that made some sense -- I'm not a good writer myself :P

 - Jason Lai, first-year college student