Would you like to hear an inspiring story of innovation and persistence? I’ve got one for you, all the way from Montreal, Canada.
Shortly after finishing his master’s degree in Applied Linguistics, Nicholas Walker got a job teaching English as a Second Language at a French college, just outside Montreal. Just like the rest of his colleagues, Nicholas assigned and corrected 2 essays each semester. He spent 10 minutes correcting each essay. With 150 students, each essay assignment produced 1500 minutes of correction time, which works out to 25 hours of correction time per essay or 50 hours of correction time per semester for just the writing component of the course. He also had to correct reading and listening quizzes, and orals, too.
Students had to wait two weeks to get their essays back with their scores.
Despite working as fast as he could and the long hours of correction, Nicholas got the sense that his students were not improving much. In other words, two essays every 15 weeks is not enough practice or feedback on errors to have much of an effect on students’ writing skills.
He tried everything: self-correction, peer correction, rubrics, underlining, and error coding. Nothing seemed to help. He was still working too hard and students were getting discouraged.
Frustrated with his students’ slow progress, Nicholas used some savings to hire a programmer in 2012 to help him build and launch a free ESL grammar checker, called the Virtual Writing Tutor. It didn’t catch many errors at first, but Nicholas had a strategy, Instead of spending 10 hours per week correcting each of his students’ errors, he used those same 10 hours to program the Virtual Writing Tutor to automatically detect and correct each error pattern he found in his students’ writing. In this way, every time anyone submitted a text containing the error, the system would detect it and correct it. In time, Nicholas had developed ten thousand error detection rules, meaning that many of the most common errors would be corrected in two seconds instead of two weeks. Nicholas was able to assign more frequent writing practice activities, and his students reported that they liked getting automated feedback in this way. An independent study conducted by researchers in Oman found a 44 percent improvement in university students when compared with students who only received corrections and feedback from their teacher.
Over the years, Nicholas has been adding new features to the Virtual Writing Tutor. One request that his students made early on was to be able to get an automatically generated score along with corrections by the Virtual Writing Tutor. Formative evaluations have been found to accelerate learning by 45% because the feedback and score come at a time when students can still do something to improve their texts. Other new features include a system to measure the proficiency level of a submitted text using the Common European Framework of Reference. The system constructs a vocabulary profile, an error profile, and an error density measurement to place the text at one of 6 proficiency levels. The system can also now improve awkward student writing by reformulating it in a more standard writing style. Students can compare how they phrased something with how it might be phrase in standard English. The system can also help teachers detect AI-generated texts, so students who resort to AI-plagiarism can get the intervention and support they need early in a course and start writing their own texts instead of cheating.
So, what’s next for Nicholas Walker and the Virtual Writing Tutor? Nicholas is till teaching college level ESL in Quebec, but now he uses his evenings and weekends for something new. He is currently developing a tool to score and give feedback to students on their speaking skills. It’s called ConverSolo. With ConverSolo, students can use their webcams and microphones to get feedback on their pronunciation, practice with a robot, and then practice with a chatbot, and then pair up with other learners at their level for live conversations on a range of topics. You can contact Nicholas Walker on Facebook, through his college email, or through the contact-us page on his websites. He loves to connect and collaborate with dedicated teachers all over the world.
