Writing/editing using computers

Gaskell's article about how to use online concordances was really interesting to me. One thing that they said was that their research did not conclusively prove anything--of the 20 students who participated in the project, only 8 self-reported feeling better about their writing (and their skills actually increased), whereas 11 students actually showed MORE errors in their writing. It seems to have helped those 8 students, and when I put myself into their shoes as a language learner, I think I would fall into the category of the 8 successful students for several reasons.

I like being able to understand a pattern myself. When a teacher gives me a rule to follow and uses a lot of meta-language, it is like having to remember the original rule PLUS all the other rules associated with it. I once conducted a classroom observation of a volunteer instructor where I used to work and watched a class took a drastic turn towards confusion as a teacher was trying to review the differences between "because" and "because of." She wrote the word "adverb clause" on the board and told students that they were to use what they had learned the week before--because is always followed by an adverb clause and because of is always followed by a noun, common or proper.

Students were supposed to be focusing on when they used the different types of "because," and instead spent most of their time trying to recall the definition of an adverb clause and bickering over the differences between common and proper nouns. There were MANY other issues associated with this, but I could see where if students would write a couple of sentences in a computer program attempting to use because/because of and used Gaskell's concordance generator, I think they would have been able to *see* the rule (without it being told to them) and realize, "when because is followed by a complete sentence, its one type; when it is followed by a person, place or thing, its another type."

Gaskell also pointed out that this is a time consuming process because the student is responsible for figuring out *which* of the generated uses matches what they are trying to say, and then how exactly to fix what they were trying to say to make it correct. In many ways, its moving the learning from a passive paper-correcting mode to an active grammar and syntax learning mode. Overall, I would give it a try--it seems like with more time, most students would really benefit.