Writing Aid Dutch. A digital writing tool for university and college students

The project encompasses the development of an electronic writing tool that aims at helping university and college students to write acceptable texts. The tool’s development fits in with the general concern to stimulate literacy of (first year) students and is complementary to an electronic learning environment and goal oriented writing workshops using observational learning. The purpose of the tool is twofold: on the one hand, it aims at stimulating students’ writing skills; on the other, it can play an important role in reducing the workload of teachers, who often lack the time to respond adequately to students’ writing problems. Several interviews and discussions with students and teachers in different KU Leuven faculties (Arts, Social Science and Engineering) as well as a needs analysis based on first year students’ writing products have made it clear that the main writing problems are situated on thelevel of coherence and cohesion, style and (to a lesser extent) spelling (De Wachter & Heeren 2011). The tool guides students through their writing process by controlling the texts they insert on the macrostructural level (paragraph building, coherence etc.), the style level and the microstructural level (spelling, verb conjugation etc.). This happens on the basis of an underlying database containing all the elements that the tool should detect. At the first level students can check, among other things, whether their text contains signal and structure words and they are provided with a ‘readability’ and ‘complexity’ index. For style, among other things, the tool provides the student with information on (informal and vague words and a the microstructural level the tool detects misspelled words. Students can edit the text in the tool itself and insert it again to control whether the altered text has improved. The tool does not automatically correct areas of concern but simply marks them in the text and gives feedback in the form of general advice, together with concrete examples and tips. The purpose of the tool is not to judge students’ texts in a strict way, telling them what is ‘wrong’ or ‘right’, but to make students aware of frequent writing problems so that these are avoided in the future. The tool therefore functions as an awareness raising system that stimulates students’ self-reflection and their self learning process and autonomy; at the same time, it evaluates the process rather than the product and it encourages students to be responsible for their own writing.status: accepte