The use of digital tools in academic literacies remains an emerging field, having advanced greatly in recent years. This dialogue responds to Schcolnik (2018), by arguing the benefits of considering the use of such tools in light of advances in digital pedagogies and applied linguistics. Going beyond understanding how academic writing developers engage with digital tools, an important next step is to consider whether their use of such tools is effective

Curry, Niall

English

Coventry University: E-Journals

        Journal of Academic Writing   Vol. 13 No 1 Summer 2023, pages 53-58   http://dx.doi.org/10.18552/joaw.v13i1.970   How Should Digital Tools for Writing be Evaluated?	 53 	 How Should Digital Tools for Writing be Evaluated? Reflections from Digital Pedagogies and Applied Linguistics   Niall Curry    Manchester Metropolitan University   Abstract    The use of digital tools in academic literacies remains an emerging field, having advanced greatly in recent years. This dialogue responds to Schcolnik (2018), by arguing the benefits of considering the use of such tools in light of advances in digital pedagogies and applied linguistics. Going beyond understanding how academic writing developers engage with digital tools, an important next step is to consider whether their use of such tools is effective.    How should digital tools for writing be evaluated? Reflections from digital pedagogies and applied linguistics  Schcolnik (2018) recognises many of the well-established motivations for using digital tools to “brainstorm, research, take notes, outline or map, draft, cite, rewrite and revise, add graphic elements [to, and] edit” an article (p. 121). Her work addresses clear lacunae in the field of academic literacies and gives much welcome insight into the academic writing practices. For example, among language tools, she finds spell checkers and dictionaries are the most used. However, while it is worthwhile knowing which tools writing developers use, an important next step would be to identify whether or not writing developers use tools to effectively support their own writing development. Moreover, upon reading the study, questions arise as to why some tools with established value in academic writing development, like corpus analysis software, are less used. While digital tools for developing academic writing remains an emerging area of interest in the field of academic literacies, research in digital pedagogies and applied linguistics offers valuable insight into this issue, with many developments emerging in recent years following the publication of Schcolnik’s (2018) paper.   Like Schcolnik (2018), literature on digital pedagogies recognises many applications of digital tools to learning and development. In key areas, digital tools have been seen to be effective for increased engagement (Croxton, 2014; Curry & Riordan, 2021; Power & St-Jacques, 2013), motivation (Abdelhafez & Abdallah, 2015; AbuSaleek, 2016; Chen 2012), autonomy (Barber, et al., 2016), accessibility (Godwin-Jones, 2018), and personalisation (Curry, 2022b; Kerr, 2015). However, analysing how digital tools ought to be applied based on our knowledge of how people learn (Johnson & Marsh, 2016) is increasingly recognised as an important practice for determining whether or not specific tools are best placed to achieve learning and developmental ends (Kirkwood & Price, 2005). Ultimately, the avoidance of tool-centricity (Curry, 2022a; Mishan, 2016) in favour of pedagogical—or developmental-centricity—is a widely shared view. Nevertheless, Tsui and Tavares (2021) offer an interesting alternative perspective on the topic, arguing for a more nuanced approach to the use of technology for informing, supporting, and potentially reshaping how we teach and learn.        Journal of Academic Writing Vol. 13 No 1 Summer 2023, pages 53-58   How Should Digital Tools for Writing be Evaluated? 	54	 Generally, criticisms of digital tools in education and writing development are reflected in discussions of how a lack of digital literacies impacts the effective exploitation of digital technologies (Claypole, 2016; Kerr, 2015). Further studies centre on the inequitable distribution of technology globally, causing a digital divide (Hockly & Dudeney, 2018), the blurring of academic and corporate roles in educational technology innovation (Wagner & Kunnann, 2015), and, in this age of data capturing and exploitation, ethical use of technology (Sharkey, 2016). Overall, a critical interrogation of the use of tools for writing development would offer insight into how to best exploit them, recognising that “digital pedagogies will not automatically support and enhance the learning process unless some thought is given to the ‘goodness of the fit’ between the learning task and the learning technology” (Selwyn, 2011, p. 88).   Schcolnik’s (2018) study is illuminating in identifying the range of technologies with which writing developers engage. However, research from second language acquisition and language pedagogy offers further insight into writing development from a language tool perspective. Take the example of concordancers. Schcolnik rightly identifies their value for collocation analysis. Yet research in data-driven learning and direct applications of corpus linguistics to learning and development shows there are many ways in which corpora and corpus analysis software can be used. Data-driven learning, or “the learner as researcher” (Bernardini, 2006, p.16), takes an inductive approach to learning (Gavioli, 2005). Writers can first observe academic language and then classify what they have observed. They can identify rules for the item being studied through grammatical analysis (Hadley, 2002) or lexical and lexico-grammatical analysis (Timmis, 2015). Interest in this type of autonomous approach to development is increasing (Granath, 2009), potentially owing to its established efficacy for learning and development (Boulton & Cobb, 2017; Pérez-Paredes, 2022).   The model in Lee and Swales (2006) exemplifies this application of data-driven learning to writing development. They report on a project in which novice writers create a small corpus of articles in their discipline and analyse them to improve their own writing. Their study produced generally positive results for using corpora to develop academic writing. Academic corpora could be examined by researchers at any career stage to investigate discreet and disciplinary facets of writing, such as how the authors express aspects of stance and engagement like rhetorical questions in their writing (e.g., Curry, 2021a). These applications could employ the use of a monolingual specialised corpus of expert writing or a comparable corpus of expert and novice writing, as in the case of Lee and Swales (2006), while multilingual corpora could be used to identify differences across languages (Almazova & Kogan, 2014; Curry & Chambers, 2017; Schmied, 2011). Overall, data-driven learning offers more than collocation analysis as Schcolnick’s participants identify and, for writers to effectively exploit language tools like concordancers, it is imperative that they be trained in their myriad uses.    Such a view is now, arguably, more important than ever before, following many fast-paced developments in digital pedagogies over the last number of years. As is well established by now, there has been a growth in use of tools for teaching and learning writing in recent years, owing to the online pivot of the COVID-19 pandemic (Curry, 2021b). At this time, there was a clear movement from the initial crisis pedagogies (Ganobcsik-Williams et al., 2022; Tsui & Tavares, 2021) that shaped global practices to a more advanced digital pedagogy. Building on this collective growth, there is an evident case to reflect on the affordance of technological advances for writing development. Moreover, these developments have been followed by a further technological advancement, the lasting effect of which on academic writing practices remains mostly unclear. That is the growth in use and access to artificial intelligence writing tools, like ChatGPT. Now occupying a growing literature in academic writing circles (Anson & Straume, 2022), much consideration is given to risks that ChatGPT poses for education (Benuyenah, 2023) as well as the ways in which it can or may be used as a tool for writing development (Anson & Straume, 2022). Pre-dating both these technological revolutions, Schcolnik’s (2018) paper offers a pathway for interrogating these new developments by grounding our reflections in established practices and developing training resources for contemporary digital pedagogies.   Kerr (2015) identifies that the untrained and ineffective use of digital tools is likely to lead to premature abandonment or misuse. Therefore, while knowledge of the practices of academic      Journal of Academic Writing Vol. 13 No 1 Summer 2023, pages 53-58   How Should Digital Tools for Writing be Evaluated? 	55	 writing developers and their engagement with digital tools holds value, this knowledge must go hand in hand with the pedagogical and theoretical rationales that guide their use. Looking more broadly to fields in education and applied linguistics, as briefly presented here, can help writing developers critically engage with digital tools and technologies to develop recommendations of not just the tools to use, but how to use them more effectively.            Journal of Academic Writing Vol. 13 No 1 Summer 2023, pages 53-58   How Should Digital Tools for Writing be Evaluated? 	56	 References   Abdelhafez, H.A., & Abdallah, M.M.S. (2015). Making it ‘authentic: Egyptian EFL student teachers’ awareness and use of authentic language materials and their learning motivation. Journal of Research in Curriculum, Instruction and Educational Technology, 1(1), 1-12. https://doi.org/10.21608/JRCIET.2015.24564   AbuSa’aleek, A.O. (2016). Students’ perceptions of English language learning in the Facebook context. Teaching English with Technology, 15(4), 60-75.   Almazova, N., & Kogan, M. (2014). Computer assisted individual approach to acquiring foreign vocabulary of students major. In P., Zaphiris, & A., Ioannou (Eds.),  Lecture Notes in Computer Science (pp. 248-257). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07485-6_25   Anson, C., & Straume, I. (2022). Amazement and trepidation: Implications of AI-based natural language production for the teaching of writing. Journal of Academic Writing, 12(1), 1-9. https://doi.org/10.18552/joaw.v12i1.820   Barber, W., King, S., & Buchanan, S. (2015). Problem based learning and authentic assessment in digital pedagogy: Embracing the role of collaborative communities. Electronic Journal of e-Learning, 13(2), 59-67.  Benuyenah, V. (2023). Commentary: ChatGPT use in higher education assessment: Prospects and epistemic threats. Journal of Research in Innovative Teaching & Learning, 16(1), 134-135. https://doi.org/10.1108/JRIT-03-2023-097  Bernardini, S. (2006). Corpora in the classroom:  an overview and some reflections on future developments. In J.M. Sinclair (Ed.), How to use corpora in language teaching (pp. 15-38). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.  Boulton, A., & Cobb, T. (2017). Corpus use in language learning: a meta-analysis. Language Learning, 67(2), 348-393. https://doi.org/10.1111/lang.12224  Chen, A. (2012, August 31-September 3). Application of gender difference and topic preference to promote students’ motivation for online EFL learning [Paper Presentation]. Eurocall 2011, Nottingham, United Kingdom, 35-40.  Claypole, M. (2016). Controversies in ELT. Linguabooks.   Croxton, R.A. (2014). The role of interactivity in student satisfaction and persistence in online learning. MERLOT Journal of Online Learning and Teaching, 10(2), 314-325.   Curry, N. (2021a). Academic writing and reader engagement: Contrasting questions in English, French and Spanish corpora. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429322921   Curry, N. (2021b). Developing learners as global citizens: Reflections on the affordances of digital pedagogies in language education. ACROSS–A Comprehensive Review of Societal Studies, 4(1), 1-11.  Curry, N. (2022a). Digital pedagogy and language teaching and learning – from research to practice. In Watkins, P. (ed.), The better learning research review (pp. 103-109). Cambridge University Press.  Curry, N. (2022). On corpus-based contrastive linguistics and language pedagogy: Reimagining applications for contemporary english language teaching. In English Language Teaching: Policy and Practice across the European Union (pp. 239-256). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-2152-0_14       Journal of Academic Writing Vol. 13 No 1 Summer 2023, pages 53-58   How Should Digital Tools for Writing be Evaluated? 	57	 Curry, N., & Chambers, A. (2017). Questions in English and French research articles in linguistics: a corpus-based contrastive analysis. Corpus Pragmatics, 1(4), 327-350. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41701-017-0012-0   Curry, N., & Riordan, E. (2021). Intelligent CALL systems for writing development: Investigating the use of write & improve for developing written language and writing skills. In CALL Theory Applications for Online TESOL Education (pp. 252-273). IGI Global. https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-7998-6609-1.ch011   Gavioli, L. (2005). Exploring corpora for ESP learning. John Benjamins.  Ganobcsik-Williams, L., Curry, N. & Neculai, C. (2022). Academic writing in times of crisis: Refashioning writing tutor development for online environments. Journal of Academic Writing, 12(1), 10-21. . https://doi.org/10.18552/joaw.v12i1.887   Godwin-Jones, R. (2018). Second language writing online: An update. Language Learning & Technology, 22(1), 1-15. https://dx.doi.org/10125/44574   Granath, S. (2009). Who benifits from learning how to use corpora?. In K. Aijmer (Ed.), Corpora and language teaching (pp. 47-66). John Benjamins.  Hadley, G. (2002). Sensing the winds of change: an introduction to data-driven learning. RELC Journal, 33(2), 99-124.  Hockly, N., & Dudeney, G. (2018). Current and future digital trends in ELT. RELC Journal, 49(2), 164-178. https://doi.org/10.1177/0033688218777318  Johnson, C., & Marsh, D. (2016). The flipped classroom. In M. McCarthy (Ed.), The Cambridge guide to blended learning for language teaching (pp. 55-67). Cambridge University Press.  Kerr, P. (2015). Adaptive learning. ELT Journal, 70(1), 88-93. https://doi.org/10.1093/elt/ccv055   Kirkwood, A., & Price, L. (2005). Learners and learning in the twenty-first century: What do we know about students’ attitudes towards and experiences of information and communication technologies that will help us design courses? Studies in Higher Education, 30(3), 257-274. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075070500095689  Lee, D., & Swales, J. (2006). A corpus-based EAP course for NNS doctoral students: moving from available specialized corpora to self-compiled corpora. English for Specific Purposes, 25(1), 56-75. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esp.2005.02.010   Mishan, F. (2016). Reconceptualising materials for the blended language learning environment. In M. McCarthy (Ed.), The Cambridge guide to blended learning for language teaching (pp. 123-38). Cambridge University Press.  Pérez-Paredes, P. (2022). A systematic review of the uses and spread of corpora and data-driven learning in CALL research during 2011–2015. Computer Assisted Language Learning, 35(1-2), 36-61. https://doi.org/10.1080/09588221.2019.1667832  Power, M., & St-Jacques, A. (2014). The graduate virtual classroom webinar: A collaborative and constructivist online teaching strategy. MERLOT Journal Of Online Learning And Teaching, 10(4), 681-696.   Schcolnik, M. (2018). Digital tools in academic writing? Journal of Academic Writing, 8(1), 121-130. https://doi.org/10.18552/joaw.v8i1.360        Journal of Academic Writing Vol. 13 No 1 Summer 2023, pages 53-58   How Should Digital Tools for Writing be Evaluated? 	58	 Schmied, J. (2011). Teaching and learning contrastive linguistics ising an EU translation corpus with English, German, French and Spanish. In N., Kübler, (Ed.), Corpora, language, teaching, and resources: from theory to practice (pp. 165-184). Peter Lang.  Selwyn, N. (2011). Education and technology: Key issues and debates. Continuum.  Sharkey, A.J. (2016). Should we welcome robot teachers? Ethics and Information Technology, 18(4), 283-297. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-016-9387-z  Timmis, I. (2015). Corpus linguistics for ELT: research and practice. Routledge.  Tsui, A., & Tavares, N.J. (2021). The technology cart and the pedagogy horse in online teaching. English Teaching & Learning, 45(1), 109-118. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42321-020-00073-z   Wagner, E., & Kunnan, A.J. (2015). The Duolingo English test. Language Assessment Quarterly, 12(3), 320-331. https://doi.org/10.1080/15434303.2020.1771343     

How should digital tools for writing be evaluated? : Reflections from digital pedagogies and applied linguistics

https://publications.coventry.ac.uk/index.php/joaw/article/download/970/985

How should digital tools for writing be evaluated? : Reflections from digital pedagogies and applied linguistics

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

Coventry University: E-Journals