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7 February 2018

Speaker: Inmaculada Senra Silva (UNED: Universidad Nacional de Educacion a Distancia, Madrid)

Title: Grammar Checker for the development of ESL writing skills

Venue and Time: room 3.58 (John Percival Building), 12.10

Abstract:

This presentation describes a new Grammar Checker designed at the UNED (Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia), Spain, to help students of English improve their writing skills.

This software provides EFL students with pedagogical feedback, enabling them to detect and correct mistakes in their own compositions. The UNED Grammar Checker was conceived as a tool by means of which students could become autonomous learners less dependent on teachers’ support with the help of computer-generated feedback. The student is alerted to a possible problem, reads the feedback, and decides whether what he wrote was correct or not and then reformulates the text for him or herself. In this way, it can help students become independent writers and allows teachers to save a great amount of time that can be used for other types of writing instruction.

This talk will describe the research followed in the development of this Grammar Checker and will analyse the advantages of this tool for distance and blended learning.

 

Inmaculada Senra Silva is an Associate Professor of English at the UNED (Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia), Madrid, Spain, where she teaches courses in English as a foreign language, language variation and change, sociolinguistics, language testing, and language policy and planning of minority languages. Her main areas of research interest include second language teaching and learning, more specifically writing and testing. She holds a PhD in English language and linguistics and has taught in various universities in Spain. She has published articles on issues in FL acquisition and teaching, and is co-author of English Skills for Independent Learners (C1), CUP (2010), and Gramática inglesa para hispanohablantes, CUP (2017). She has participated in the EU Lifelong Learning Project “FluenCI: Fluency for Conversational Interaction” and other research projects whose aim was to design a grammar checker for learners of English as a foreign language.