Features

What are target structures? Optimal second language pedagogy involves a repeating exchange of meaningful messages with a focus on target structures. By “exchange,” I mean that teachers should provide learners with opportunities to create sentences, paragraphs, stories, essays, blog posts, articles or reports that are meaningful to the learner. Learners should express those messages to

How to Use the Word Counter on the Virtual Writing Tutor When you want to know how many words are in a particular text, paste the text into the text area and click the “Count Words” button. The system will count your words and sentences, and calculate your average sentence length. The text you enter

New Grammar Checker Forum The Virtual Writing Tutor has added a community forum to its free grammar checker. Post your text, tell the community what kind of help you need, and benefit from the free proofreading service that the community can provide. You can get help with your grammar, spelling, punctuation, and structure.  It costs nothing

Students sometimes inadvertently plagiarize because they don’t know how to paraphrase. To remedy this gap in their learning, I created a paraphrase checker for the Virtual Writing Tutor. The concept is simple. The system shows you which words are the same and need to be paraphrased. This feature is very useful for students and for blog

  Feature List (The numbers below correspond to the numbers on the image above.) Click on the logo to return to the main page. Update your password, newsletter subscription status. Create a free account and login. For added convenience, you stay logged in until you logout. Use speech recognition for hands free operation or to

Have you ever read a choose-your-own-adventure story? A hypertext narrative is a branching story just like that but online with hyperlinks. The reader reads a section of the story and then chooses how the story should progress by clicking on a link. See examples of hypertext stories created with the Virtual Writing Tutor. You can

The default layout displays feedback on the errors detected by the grammar checker below your submitted text. This was a pedagogical choice. The idea is that learners must try to remember the feedback long enough to scroll up to the text area and make to the correction. Some users have requested that their text and the

Anyone can check spelling and grammar for free. Non-members can check 500 words. Members can check up to 3000 words at once. Membership is 100% free and comes with many additional benefits. How to check spelling and grammar  

Have you tried the Random Error Checker Game? The new interactive version of the game is located on the Games page.