Technology and L2 Writing

 

New information and communication technologies are altering writing practices in important ways. As Relles and Tierney (2013) put it, “the integration of communication technologies with academic culture suggests that the writing habits of tomorrow’s students will be navigational across myriad discourse situations that do and will yet exist” (501). Students in fourth grade, for example, while still working on writing sentences, may be Routinely asked to go beyond traditional writing tasks to put together PowerPoint slides, collages, or contribute text to blogs. High school students, while drafting persuasive essays, may be tasked with writing Facebook or Twitter posts. College students continue to write lab reports but also need to construct multimodal compositions that include both text and visuals. Successful business people must be able to write communications to be disseminated through a variety of social media.

All teachers, schools, and colleges are challenged to respond to the changing nature of writing (Herrington and Moran 2009). Fortunately, the same wave of technologies affecting writing practices provides a wealth of tools for the teaching of second or foreign language writing. Such tools have been adopted by business and education to improve the teaching and learning of writing. In this chapter, we describe technologies developed to aid in the writing process, which are also used for teaching. Following the description, we

provide a critical analysis of the empirical research on the effectiveness of software and web‐based technologies in teaching L2 writing.

A.    Technologies for L2 writing

·         Web 2.0 applications

Web 2.0 tools include the variety of social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as blogs.

·         Automated writing evaluation

Automated writing evaluation (AWE) systems have been developed to assist both native speakers and L2 learners to write more accurately by providing them with automated corrective feedback.

·         Corpus‐based tools

Like AWE systems, a number of corpus‐based tools have been developed as resources for L2 writers to gain access to examples of authentic language use in collections of electronic texts.

B.     Empirical research on L2 writing technologies

·         L2 writing with Web 2.0 applications

Social networking sites (SNS) and wiki‐type tools as representative Web 2.0 platforms have allowed the researchers to investigate L2 writers’ engagement in meaningful social interaction as well as collaborative writing (Lee 2010). For example, Kessler, Bikowski, and Boggs (2012) investigated the use of Google Docs in a team‐based project‐oriented writing activity in an English for academic purposes training program with 38 L2 writers.

·         L2 writing and AWE

In the past decade, research has examined the use of AWE tools for helping learners with their writing, that in some cases these promising tools can be challenging to implement with the intended effects. For example, in a critical analysis, Stevenson and Phakiti (2014) evaluated outcomes from research encompassing AWE systems specifically designed as tools for providing corrective feedback in the writing classroom.

·       L2 writing and corpus‐based technologies Empirical studies of corpus use for data‐driven learning have yielded positive findings (Flowerdew 2012). For example, Garner (2013) examined the effects of a data‐driven learning approach on ESL undergraduate students’ use of linking adverbials.

Reference :

A Chapelle, Carol and Sauro, Shannon. (2017). The Handbook of Technology and Second Language Teaching and Learning: Technology and L2 Writing. India: Willey backwell