Nusrat Jahan
ID:
2014-1-92-022
MA
in ELT
Review
of EverWrite
EverWrite is one of the remarkable
English learning especially writing skill based software. It is a CD-ROM
accompany to ‘Evergreen’ (7th edition) that consist of six different
practice and test contents. The factors
or contents are e. g. editing exercises, identify rhetorical paragraphs,
working with transitions, organizing your thoughts, recognizing your thesis
statements and practicing grammar. There are two types of tasks in this
software e. g. practice and test where practices helps students to practice
more and enhance their writing skill and tests emphasizes on the feedback and
evaluation.
In the editing exercise part, first
of all, there are sixteen sub-parts that starts with adjectives and adverbs and
ends with writing paragraph. This is the initial stage of essay writing. Here,
all the practices and tests are related to writing accurately and appropriately.
Second, identify rhetorical paragraphs is interrelated to identify the essay or
paragraph type because there are various types of paragraphs e. g. definition,
classification, cause and effect, analytical etc. And the third part includes
the transitional aspects of writing that how transitional expressions help
learners to write efficiently. And the other two parts includes the organizing
the thoughts and reorganizing the thesis statement as well. And the final part
is about grammar learning practices and tests that also includes the tense,
verb, punctuation etc. grammar related tasks.
Now I would like to discuss about
the EverWrite software according to some factors like learner motivation and
interest, user friendliness, interaction and some other minor aspects.
According
to Howard Gardner’s (1983) multiple intelligence the various types of apparatus
helps students to perceive more in terms of language learning. Here, the
software EverWrite has the writing tests and practices but in a different way
that related to technology. And a student himself/herself can learn through it
without any interference. That is why students of tertiary level in our country
will be interested and motivated to use this software. Moreover, it is a CD-ROM
type software that has no link with internet. So, the students of rural areas
and without internet service can use this software. It is also another issue
that can motivate students. There are a lot of practices and tests are included
in this software that enhances the writing skill of students integrated with
reading skill also. And it also gives the scores to the students that will also
motivate students to explore it and learn more as well.
The
learner autonomy theory of Henri Holec (1981) is related to self directed
software like EverWrite because in this software, learners have the own
responsibility to learn the aspects which they think important for them. The
practices will also help learners to write the essays with appropriate use of cohesion
and coherence.
In
terms of user friendliness, EverWrite is a very easy to access software where a
learner needs to write his user name and starts to explore the practices and
tests. The each and every practice sessions are put separately and the areas
are also stated separately and it is helpful for the learners to choose his/her
weak part and practice those. In addition, the instructions of the tests and
practices and the eye soothing background color of the software home page is
also another user friendliness aspect for the learners.
In
the case of interaction, this software is not interaction based software. It is
based on learner autonomy and here learners are responsible for their learning.
But teacher can provide some writing task e.g. writing essay or paragraph after
exploring the software. And this software is not free software like some other
software, it is quite costly and students need to buy it from the Evergreen
website. And there is no time limitation for the practices and tests in this
software that is another weakness. However, this software follows the
notional-functional approach to manage the tests and practices which is
interrelated to communication language teaching which is an important factor.
Above all the discussions, we can
say that this is excellent software for language learning especially for
writing skill. It can be suitable for the rural and urban context with adult
and younger students. And teachers can use it for the students to teach grammar
to follow notional-functional instruction of language teaching.
Reference:
Website:
http://infed.org/mobi/howard-gardner-multiple-intelligences-and-education/,
date: 17 November 2015, time: 3.30 PM
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