Adjective Form Error

Knowing when to use the noun form of a word or an adjective form can be tricky. You can link a subject with either a noun or an adjective using the verb to be.  You can say,"I was a star," where star is a noun. You can also say, "I was famous," where famous is an adjective. Some choices are more difficult when nouns, adjectives, and adverbs are similar.

 Which is correct, "I am angry" or "I am anger" or "I am angrily"?

Do you know the answer? 

Answer:

✗ When I heard the news, I was very anger.
✗ When I heard the news, I was very angrily.
✓ When I heard the news, I was very angry.
? The noun "anger" means, "a strong feeling of annoyance, displeasure, or hostility."  The adverb "angrily" describes an action and means, "in an angry way."  The adjective "angry" means, "full of anger." Use the adjective form not the noun form in this context.

Other examples of this error:

1. Let's eat. I'm hunger.  
2. As a cheerleader, I have to be enthusiast. 
3. I'm so pride of my son. 

Resources:

• Check your writing for avoidable errors using the Virtual Writing Tutor, the best online ESL grammar checker.
• Download the Error Correction Card Game 
• Follow us on Facebook.
• Order the Revision Strategies Card from Bokomaru Publications

Adjective Agreement Error

In some languages, adjectives agree with the noun they modify in terms of gender (masculine, feminine, or neuter) and number (singular or plural). Do you know the rule for English? Test yourself. 

Do you know the answer? 

Answer:

✗ We sell t-shirts and some others clothes.
✓ We sell t-shirts and some other clothes.
? Adjectives and noun modifiers should not take a plural form when they modify plural nouns in English. There are, however, a few noun modifiers that end in an –s: operations, arms, sports, jobs, forensics, physics

Other examples of this error:

1. Sometimes, stranges things happen to me. 
2. They look like two twins girls.
3. Maybe in a few years I will do a couple of faces lifts to look younger.
4. I am always reading some loves stories in secret.  
5. I have the strange habit to inform myself about the latest students parties.
6. I have worked on many films projects.
7. I don't pay rent, but I help my landlord repair differents things.
8. We sell offices products.

Resources:

• Check your writing for avoidable errors using the Virtual Writing Tutor, the best online ESL grammar checker.
• Download the Error Correction Card Game 
• Follow us on Facebook.
• Order the Revision Strategies Card from Bokomaru Publications

Bad Corrections, Hedges, and False Alarms in the Corrective Feedback of an ESL Grammar Checker

One distinction I like to make between the Virtual Writing Tutor and other online grammar checkers is that the Virtual Writing Tutor is an English second language grammar checker whereas all others are English first language grammar checkers. You might wonder what the difference is since good grammar is good grammar. For me, it is a matter of assumptions, frequency of occurrence, and catching more errors.

Bad Corrections

Whereas certain popular and well-advertised commercial grammar checkers will detect and flag verb form errors, they might not be able to propose the right correction because the wrong assumption has been made about the error. Here's how one very popular and well-developed online grammar checker responds to one of my student's sentences.

What has happened is that this grammar checker has used the auxiliary to guide the correction of the verb. Looking further into the sentence, it is clear that "am going" is a bad correction. This particular grammar checker seems to have assumed that the writer has full control over auxiliaries and simply used the wrong form for the participle. This assumption has led the developer of the error-detection rule to ignore the rest of the sentence and propose just one correction based the theory that the auxiliary is right but the lexical verb is in the wrong form.

There are other theories that might explain this error. My preferred theory for most errors is that a combination of chaos and the first language impose themselves upon the expression of the message in the second language. From my experience teaching English to French-speaking college students here in Quebec, learners lack control over both the participle and the auxiliary. They don't know when they need an auxiliary and they don't know how the auxiliary interacts with the lexical verb that follows it. When they don't know, they frequently turn to their first language for guidance.

Teachers familiar with the learner's first language are usually able to interpret the error and supply a correct form because of clues the learner provides. Learners tend to have a sense that if the event happened in the past, pastness needs to be conveyed either with the verb or with other words in the sentence like "yesterday" or "before." In many cases, how best to convey pastness remains a mystery for beginners and low-intermediates, so no assumption based one part of the verb or one part of the sentence is safe. In other words, as I attempt to write error detection rules for the Virtual Writing Tutor, the presence of an auxiliary won't always indicate how best to correct a verb form error.

In this case, a combination of chaos and first language word-for-word translation seems to be responsible for "I am went at New-York." French speakers might produce "I am went at New-York" simply by translating "Je suis allé à New York" word-for-word, plus a little confusion about what the past participle of "go" might be. Since students may be more familiar with the Past Simple form "went" and less familiar with the past participle "gone," the combination "I am went" would not surprise ESL teachers working in Quebec. The correction "I am going" would.

Grammar Checkers for ESL Teachers

Bad automatic corrections put ESL teachers off all automatic grammar checkers. One of my colleagues confessed to me that he has never used the Virtual Writing Tutor with his students simply because he cannot believe that a machine could ever be effective at correcting ESL writing. His limited experience with automatic correction has led him to believe that grammar checkers are terrible and only a human teacher can sort out the chaos of ESL writing.

I try not to press my grammar checker on my colleagues for two simple reasons: 1) I do not want to be a bore, and 2) I recognize that it is still very much a work in progress. Even so, I earnestly want teachers to incorporate automated quizzes and automatic grammar correction into their pedagogy because I want to free them from some of the drudgery of teaching ESL. I believe that the less time teachers spend on surface errors, the more time they can spend developing their own digital literacy and preparing really engaging lessons for their students.

A Work in Progress

I remain optimistic about the Virtual Writing Tutor because frankly the trend is good. My students can pop in a one-thousand word narrative that they have been working on and get 15-35 appropriate corrections in just a couple of seconds. If you consider that a teacher can correct a couple of surface errors in a minute, the time savings for an ESL teacher supplied with a free ESL grammar checker is potentially enormous. If my skeptical colleague spent just two minutes per student of surface error correction for each of his 150 students, that's two and half hours not spent reading students' papers for meaning and two and a half hours not spent developing greater proficiency with other pedagogical power tools

But who can blame the skeptics among us? Look at the effect of the bad correction advice on our learner's sentence. As you can see below, the corrected version of the learner's sentence based on the feedback offered by this popular grammar checker makes the sentence even less comprehensible than before.

Notice how no further errors are detected. Teachers who care about providing quality feedback to their students will roll their eyes and then roll up their sleeves to get back to correcting errors the old-fashioned way. When teachers lose confidence in automated grammar checkers, they won't introduce them to their students and one potentially powerful source of lifelong learning opportunities is denied to them. When students complete their ESL courses, their source of corrective feedback on grammar errors dries up and they may avoid writing in English in the future. Teachers need a better ESL grammar checker for their students for better instruction now and for lifelong learning in the future.

A Better ESL Grammar Checker

A better ESL grammar checker should avoid bad correction advice and detect more of the errors that learners make. Look how the Virtual Writing Tutor responds to the same sentence. It recognizes that it is the (#1) auxiliary that is the problem, not the lexical verb. Also, it detects an issue (#2) with "at New-York" and (#3) the hyphen in "New-York." It detects that (#4) two sentences have been joined with a coordinator but without a comma. Finally, it flags (#5) the use of the definite article before "shop." This last error is debatable.

Hedges

Since the Virtual Writing Tutor matches patterns at the sentence level in order to detect and correct errors, I can never be sure if the pattern and message I define for it will always anticipate the intended meaning of the author. False-alarms occur when an error-detection pattern matches a correct combination of words in an unanticipated context. When I suspect that a pattern could be correct, I hedge my bets by asking the writer to decide if the pattern has the intended meaning. I want to avoid giving such bad advice that it turns learners and their teachers off automated feedback forevermore. Correction #5 is one example of a hedge. I ask the learner to apply a rule "unless" dot, dot, dot.

Do not use the definite article before the word "shop" unless it is a shop you have mentioned before or there is only one shop, or it is a specific shop that everyone knows of. Did you mean "and I was lost in a shop"?. 

A human teacher wouldn't have to hedge in this situation. He or she would be able to look back at the sentences that came before to see if a particular shop had been mentioned earlier. The Virtual Writing Tutor can only look at the other words in the same sentence. Hedges that ask the writer to decide if there is only one shop or if there is a shop everyone can be expected to know runs the risk of making the feedback message overly complex for beginners to read and understand. Like bad corrections, overly complex feedback may put learners and teachers off also. Users can, however, try the Google Translation button when they feel really stuck.

Correct but Not Correct

Let's look at trickier problem for an ESL grammar checker. What do you do with a sentence which is grammatically correct but totally inappropriate for the learner's intended meaning? You hedge, of course. Here's an example of where I had to hedge. Consider the following three sentences: Our work place is a prison. It names Bordeaux Prison. It have three floors.

While this well-known grammar checker catches the conjugation error, in the context of the three sentences, a human should also recognize that "It names Bordeaux Prison" is not the right way to express the author's intended meaning in English. "It names" should be "it is called" or "it is named" even though the there is nothing wrong with the conjugation of the verb or pronoun choice. Ignoring this nonstandard phrase error is, in my opinion, a bad idea because it is an error an ESL teacher would ordinarily correct. 

Nevertheless, there are contexts in which "it names" makes sense. Checking Lextutor's concordance of a 14 million word corpus is encouraging because "it names" returns zero hits. See below. 

The standard phrase "it names" to express the meaning that a report names a particular individual or institution is relatively rare. But we can do better than even large corpora these days when looking for low-frequency phrases by doing a Google search. Here is the result of Google search with "it names" in quotes. Look what I found: a number of matches.

 While none of these instances of "it names" occurs at the beginning of a sentence they way it does in our learner text, restricting the error detection rule to only "It names" at the beginning of a sentence makes the rule less robust and there is no reason to believe that correct uses of "it names" could not also happen at the beginning of sentences. To avoid an outright false alarm in the future, I have chosen to hedge. 

Here is how the Virtual Writing Tutor ESL grammar checker detects, corrects, and hedges as it responds the errors in "Our work place is a prison. It names Bordeaux Prison. It have three floors."

Notice how correction #2 appropriately catches the non-standard phrase error. Also, notice how it is only by reading the preceding sentence "Our workplace is a prison" that we can be sure that the second sentence is indeed an error. Since the Virtual Writing Tutor cannot use words in other sentences to decide if a correction is warranted, a hedge is in order based on the assumption that "It names" has a higher probability of being used incorrectly in ESL writing. 

This is what the Virtual Writing Tutor says:

The phrase "It names Bordeaux Prison" will cause readers to pause and scratch their heads if you are using it to inform the reader of the name of someone or something. A more standard way is to say, ''It is called Bordeaux Prison''. The phrase "It names" can, however, be used in a sentence to tell the reader that an official report or legal judgement identifies a key individual. 

In my view, adding the hedge at the end should make the inevitable false alarm less upsetting to advanced ESL learners and their teachers. In the meantime,  this error detection rule can continue to catch the relatively high frequency inappropriate uses of "it names" + proper name in ESL writing.

Conclusion

So there you have it. I wanted to provide a little insight into the kinds of difficulties I face in writing error detection rules and correction messages. I also wanted to show how the Virtual Writing Tutor is aiming to become the best ESL grammar checker available by catching more errors--even if they are not strictly grammar errors--and how I am hedging my bets along the way. Finally, from time to time I like to reiterate my view that technology has the potential to liberate teachers from some of the time consuming drudgery of surface error correction and how a well-developed ESL grammar checker could help learners become lifelong learners of English writing. 

So what do you think? Leave a comment.

Noticing and Explicit Correction: a Grammar Checker for ESL Learners

Learning English as a Second Language isn't just about practice, as many teachers and students believe. Accurate and effective use of the grammatical forms and sentence structures of English requires extensive focused attention on form and meaning (Schmidt, 1990). Explicit corrective feedback helps in that regard. It leads the learner to notice how his or her expression of an idea is different from the usual way a native speaker might express the same idea, helping the learner notice the regularities of the target language. Giving focused attention to both the error and the correction with a clear explanation brings the linguistic structure under conscious control and prepares it for automation.

Consider the golfer who sends his golf ball into the woods instead of onto the green. No amount of

practice will help if he continues to practice his mistakes. Correction from a golf-pro can help the golfer bring aspects of his swing under greater conscious control during practice so that a correct swing will become second-nature over time.

In the same way, the Virtual Writing Tutor online grammar checker helps learners notice what they are doing wrong, why it is wrong, and how to correct it in the future. Over time it can help learners gain greater control over the grammar, spelling, punctuation, word order and word choice of English by providing explicit feedback to enhance noticing.

The Virtual Writing Tutor goes one step further. The system also provides links to remedial practice activities in its members area MOOC to further assist the learner in recognizing and correcting similar mistakes in a series of graded practice activities. With use, students who use the Virtual Writing Tutor online grammar checker will become more accurate and confident at ESL writing over time.

That’s the theory, anyway.

Schmidt, R. (1990).The role of consciousness in second language learning. Applied Linguistics, 11,129-158.

The First ESL Grammar Checker

Origin

The First and Best ESL Grammar Checker

The Virtual Writing Tutor is a free online English as a Second Language (ESL) grammar checker. Virtual Writing Tutor references over 5100 error detection rules developed by analyzing the errors of low-intermediate Francophone college (CEGEP) students' writing in English. Thanks to the generous support of Bokomaru Publications and with the help of a programmer,  VirtualWritingTutor.com was launched on April 5th, 2012.

Goal

Our goal from the outset with the Virtual Writing Tutor has been, above all, to enhance ESL pedagogy. Since one of the best ways to learn the structure of English is by writing in English, we figure that good pedagogy will be served through the development of a tool that supports teachers in their efforts to get students to write more. Automating corrective feedback could reduce the amount of time teachers spend giving corrective feedback to their students, and therefore should allow teachers to set more writing assignments for their students.

Here is the logic. The amount of writing college students do in a course is usually constrained by the amount of time a teacher has for evaluation and feedback, and, as any teacher will attest, most students are loath to write a multi-paragraphed, structured text unless it "counts." However, when an assignment counts, there is also the expectation of corrective feedback on grammar, word choice, and punctuation on one or more drafts.

I cannot attest for other countries or provinces, but in the Quebec junior college system (a.k.a. CÉGEP system), teachers routinely teach between 125-150 students per semester. Since each writing assignment will normally result in a minimum of 5-10 minutes of underlining, error-coding, or explicit correction per student, each writing assignment adds 10-25 hours of correction time to a teacher's otherwise busy week.

125 Ss x 5 min = 625 min = 10 h 25 min

150 Ss x 10 min = 1500 min = 25 h

With such an impact on workload, teachers usually do not assign more than one or two 350-500 word writing assignments per semester. Automating corrective feedback on errors, should therefore free teachers from the most time-consuming element of writing evaluation and allow them to set additional writing assignments each semester. More assignments will lead to more writing practice, more corrective feedback, and better learning.

Good ESL pedagogy is also served when a student receives corrective feedback in a timely fashion. The very fastest a teacher can provide hand-coded corrective feedback to a class is the week after they have handed in an assignment. Automatic corrective feedback provided online through a website such as the Virtual Writing Tutor can provide at least as much or substantially more corrective feedback in about one second. That's 144000 times faster!

In short, our goal for the Virtual Writing Tutor is to be non-trivial.

Theory

Underpinning the development of a grammar checker for English-Second-Language learners is the assumption that second language writing errors are both predictable and recurrent. Any teacher who has spent more than a year teaching writing can tell you that they see the same errors again and again from the same student and across groups of students, year after year.

Errors are understandable when we look at their causes. The most frequent errors in my students' writing tend to originate as translations of structures and sequences in the learner's first language. An example of one such error is the word choice error I have 18 years old for I am 18 years old, and the word order error She is a woman very popular for She is a very popular woman. Such transfer errors are very common and may need to be corrected many times before the learner is able to eliminate them from his or her writing.

Another high frequency type of error comes from learners simply not knowing the correct form, so an incorrect form is used in its place. That seems to be what is going on in sentences such as We did a lot of sandwiches.French employs faire in contexts where English uses either do or make. The problem is that when earners do not have an extensive knowledge of word collocations, they will guess between the two English forms. The learner will guess correctly sometimes and incorrectly other times.

A third type of error comes from the learner using a false analogy. The learner may know how to write a sentence such as It's big or It's far, but then he or she will falsely assume the sentence It's depend is equally correct because the sentence shares the first word it. Obviously, the learner is not yet aware that big and far are adjectives while depend is a verb and needs to be conjugated.The learner has yet to analyze enough English to know the difference.

A forth type is the false belief. Sometimes learners think they have understood something about English when in fact they have got the wrong idea. For example, one student wrote, You can describe myself as impulsive. What he meant was You could describe me as impulsive. The writer seems to have concluded that myself is an object pronoun.

Other errors are recurrent but are not specific to second language learners. They are due rather to overly rapid typing, inattention or fatigue. An extra keystroke can result in a typo, and a distraction can cause you to type a word twice. While an online spell/grammar checker can be useful in helping locate these recurrent errors, they can occur for all writers writing in either their first language or second language. Here we might label these mistakes rather than errors. Simply having a classmate proofread a text will be enough to eliminate them. No specialized knowledge is required.

While all these errors are recurrent, they are not entirely predictable, are they? We cannot always be sure what forms learners will bring over from their first language because of the principle of homoiophobia. Nor can we ever know with absolute certainty what learners have forgotten from prior instruction or what false analogies and what false beliefs they will come out with.However, the past predicts the future in a probabilistic way. In other words, the more frequently an error has occurred in the past, the more likely we can expect the same error to be committed in the future. 

Method

Since ESL writing errors tend to be somewhat recurrent in L2 writing, we assume that the best way to develop error detection rules is from authentic learner texts. One obvious place to start looking for high frequency errors is in learner corpora and our own learners' writing assignments. Of course, we would like our system to be useful to learners all over the world, so we equipped the Virtual Writing Tutor with a script to capture text submitted to the system and store it in a database for later rule development and refinement.

Some teacher-intuition comes into play as we review these texts for errors. High priority errors for us are those that relate to our lessons on English verb tense, aspect, and prepositions, and the error correction practice tasks we given them.

However, we do not rely on teacher-intuition alone to validate our rules. Collocations are checked in a 3+million word native speaker corpus in an attempt to create reliable rules and avoid false positives. Two things have become apparent in the process. First of all, 3 million words is not enough to capture the range of expressions and communicative functions that English has to offer. The corpus often comes up short when queried with what seems to me to be a common enough expression. Secondly, memory or teacher-intuition is not as reliable as you might think. Try it. You might be convinced--as I was--that to and said can never appear in sequence because infinitive structures must contain to + the base form of a verb, but a concordancer can show you an authentic context where to + said can occur. Creating an error-detection rule that identifies to + said would result in a false alarm, something we try hard to avoid.

Additional Features

The Virtual Writing Tutor is more than just an error detector. It is also an instant curriculum. When a learner submits his or her text with errors in it, the system returns corrective feedback messages and links to related online error correction activities. The idea is that motivated learners will be able to follow those links to individual activities and develop error-correction as a skill. For an example of the range of errors the system can detect and the type of individualize instruction the system can provide, see this click here. To see a random selection of sentences with errors, visit this random error-correction activity and follow the directions. 

Limitations

Whenever we attempt to show off the system to other teachers, problems become apparent.Teachers have two expectations. One is that the system will detect all errors in a text. The second is that the system will not detect any errors in a "correct" piece of writing. By reviewing the database of captured texts, we are able to recognize these tests as the come along. Telltale signs are overly simplistic sentences that contain little else but a single agreement or tense error. For example, He work or He work yesterday are recent examples. Then there is always some attempt at feeding the system nonsense, like He work work. Here is a recent example of a test a teacher set for our system and how it bombed.

False positives are a real concern.  Recently, I was shocked to discover that the sentence, I have to leave at... produced a false alarm. Koreans and Chinese have the family name I or Lee or Rhee, so when the Virtual Writing Tutor detected a singular proper name before a verb without any inflection, it returned the corrective feedback message that I have to should be I has to. I quickly added the exception. Needless to say, the Virtual Writing Tutor is a work in progress.

Finally, a more serious concern is that we will not be able to provide much help to advanced learners. That is a bridge we will cross once beginner and intermediate errors have been more fully dealt with. Stay tuned.

Conclusion

The Virtual Writing Tutor is a work in progress, but the goal is sound. Month after month, we continue to develop rules based on our students's errors. With the help of learners and teachers who alert us to missed errors and false alarms and at the rate we are going, in a year or two, the system will begin to compare favourably with the range of errors a human teacher can correct--only quicker. When that happens, we will have achieved our goal of creating a non-trivial pedagogical power-tool.

Googie Spell Spell Checker 198 Word Limitation

The VirtualWritingTutor and GrammarFix websites use Googie Spell from Orangoo Labs to check spelling of text. The spell checker was added to help improve the accuracy of the grammar checker, which assigns a part of speech to each word submitted to the grammar checker so that powerful grammar rules can be employed when checking the grammar in a text. If a verb is spelled incorrectly, the system is unable to identify which verb it is and check whether it is conjugated properly. Equally, if a noun is spelled incorrectly, the system can tell if it is singular or plural.

It came as a shock and a disappointment to me when I received a message from teacher letting me know that the spellchecker did not work. I took a long text that a student had sent me, and sure enough, the spellchecker did not find a single error. I then set about to run a few tests. This what I discovered.

The Googie Spell spell checker stops working when paragraphs exceed 198 words in length.

With a paragraph containing 198 words, Googie Spell works perfectly

With a paragraph containing 200 words, Googie Spell stopped working

The same paragraph containing 200 words, on the Orangoo Labs' Demo Page--same problem

Googie Spell can check the spelling without a problem with texts of 5 paragraphs of 198 words each, but starts to act erratically when you add a sixth paragraph of 198 words. As you can see below, it stops identifying my spelling error "twoo" after the second paragraph.

Googie Spell stops finding errors in the third 198-word paragraph when you give it 6 paragraphs of 198 words.

I will look for another solution or place a warning on the website telling visitors about this newly discovered limitation.

Dr. Rod Ellis on Corrective Feedback on Student Writing

The take-home message? Current thinking on corrective feedback can be summarized as follows: it is likely to be effective when it is explicit, sustained, and focused. The VirtualWritingTutor provides explicit and sustained feedback. It is not, however, focused.  The system detects every error it can.

Play-by-Wiki and the Virtual Writing Tutor

The Wiki Writing Project

By Andjam79 (flickr.com) [CC-BY-2.0
 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)],
via Wikimedia Commons

The Virtual Writing Tutor was created to solve a practical problem. In order to provide my students with more writing practice in my college ESL courses, I created a 6 week-long play-by-wiki writing simulation game. The project was such a hit with my French-speaking college students that nearly everyone wrote double the minimum word count I had set for the project. The correction load generated by the assignment was enormous.

I asked the people in my college's writing center to help, but the writing center became so crowded with my students that other teachers in my department complained that their students couldn't get an appointment. In the end, I decided it would be easier to program a grammar checker than to do all the correction by hand every semester.

Play-by-Wiki

Here is the game that caused all the trouble. In groups of 5-6, students imagine a house somewhere in the world and write a description of it on their group's wiki. Each student then imagines an unusual roommate to share the house and begins to write the rest of the story from the perspective of that character. The story has seven sections.

1. The first section sets the scene with the whole group deciding on the description and location of a house somewhere in the world. 
2. The second section is a first-person description of that character: appearance, how long he or she has been living in the house, and his or her daily routine. 
3. The third section is a description of a party thrown for the new roommate. Each roommate brings something to the party that reflects how unusual that character is. 
4. Then, each character goes to bed and has a dream which reveals what he or she wants most in life. (This bit is very important. Characters need a desire we can frustrate to generate conflict.)
5. Soon after, the house gets crowded as roommates bring home pets, relatives and friends. The section involves the characters describing and complaining about the overcrowding.
6. Then, each roommate has a disastrous day and confides in another roommate all his or her frustrations. 
7. Then a meeting is called and one roommate is asked to leave. During that meeting, someone gets punched and someone gets kissed.

I have tried other versions of this project where characters work together in an office, go to superhero school, and set up a colony on Mars, etc. In every case, the project generates a tremendous amount of meaningful writing and lively group discussions in the classroom. With the help of the VirtualWritingTutor.com, peer assessment activities and a self-assessment checklist, I am proud to say that teaching writing at junior college has never been easier and more enjoyable for everyone involved.

Here is an example of the project one student wrote. As you read it, reflect the variety or grammar and vocabulary the project generated. Also, because of the collaborative nature of the project, notice how it is impossible for students to plagiarize. For a complete 15 week course with, games, vocabulary exercises, practice activities, grammar lessons, quizzes, PowerPoints, and a Moodle companion site with a wiki with a complete set of instructions, visit TangoPublications.com and click on Actively Engaged at College in the webstore.

Sample Project

Our house is in Pakistan. It is in Karachi. It has 4 bedrooms. It is pink. It has a big backyard with an apple tree. Our house has a yoga room that we love. It also has cracked floors that drive us all crazy.

List of the characters with their countries of origin.

1. John is a chef, and he is from North Korea. 

2. David recently got out of jail, and he is from Brazil.

3. Mike is a fat gamer, and he is the United States.

4. Samantha is a prostitute and is from Russia. 

5. I'm Kelly. I'm from Honduras. 

Who Am I?

My name is Kelly, I'm 22 years old. I am an ordinary young girl. I'm tall, and I wear casual clothes like jeans and t-shirts. My favourite piece of clothing is an orange sweater. I love to wear a big hood on top of everything else I'm wearing. Sweatshirts with hoods are extremely comfortable that's why I love them so much. I am blonde, I have small green eyes, and I have one foot that's bigger than the other one. This year my program is Social Science and I've been living in this house for two weeks. Besides that, I really am into swords. I love swords so much that I even have a very precious collection of antique swords. I love them more than anything in this whole world. I really am into interior design too. I love to integrate swords in my designs. Some may find my designs a little weird but I love them just the way they are, and I wouldn't change them for anyone. There is one thing I have to tell you guys. My parents hate me, and so does my doctor. They are plotting something against me, and they are making up false stories about me. One of the stories is that I'm apparently suffering from schizophrenia. This is obviously untrue! I am without any doubt not schizophrenic, I promise you. (Word count = 229)

A Traumatic Party

We were in our new house, and we were organizing a party for our new roommate, David. Everything seemed to be fine, and we were ready to party. Our roommate whose name is Samantha brought with her a lot of her guy friends from her work. I don't really know what kind of work she's doing but she always comes back home late at night. I know our roommate John is a chef in a big fancy restaurant, and he was the one in charge of making the food. He cooked a frog dish with delicious spices for everyone. Mike is our fat gamer roommate, he spends most of his time on his computers, and he loves to eat. Mike's friends were invited to the party too and they brought their computers with them so that they can play together. John seemed a little stressed out because he had his friends from his restaurant over, and he wanted to impress them with the dinner that he had prepared. I was at the party with my friends from planet Zarbtall, and we were exchanging and trading our swords. My friends and I are really into swords. We have a very precious collection of antique swords. My friends were also there to help me decorate the house we hung lots of balloons, and other kinds of cool decoration but everyone ignored our hard work and pretended like they didn't see anything as if my friends and I were seeing things they couldn't see. Everything was fine until Mike and his friends started to eat everything John had prepared. David wasn't even home yet and all the food was gone. In order to calm John down, Samantha locked him in his dog cage. John always sleeps in his dog cage and is obsessed with it. When Samantha's guy friends saw how much attention she was paying to John, they got jealous and were in a bad mood. They were hungry as well, so it didn't help the situation. They started to fight with Mike's friends because they were the ones who ate all the food. There was a big fight in the house; I can't remember who was fighting with whom. My friends from planet Zarbtall were killed while they were fighting. Everyone used all of my swords to fight. And the decoration we made was destroyed just like everything else. Almost as soon as David got home, he somehow got into the fight too. My head was hurting and I was sad, so I went to sleep. (Word count = 425)

A Cool Dream 

So after the party, I went to bed. I was very sad because my friends from planet Zarbtall were killed in the fight and nobody seemed to care as if they weren't important or as if nobody except me could notice their presence when they were alive. It was hard for me to fall asleep because my head was hurting and the death of my friends was a very tragic and traumatic moment for me. I finally and slowly began to fall asleep. I dreamt about my friends coming back to life because they are invincible and because they have special powers that I didn't know about. It was a very cool dream because I was sure I would never see them again. In my opinion I dreamt about them because I missed them a lot in the moment. I also think I dreamt about them because I wanted to say sorry about my roommates. They are so rude and they didn't even seem to be concerned about the death of my friends. I think my dream indicates how important it is for me to feel normal. My friends from Zarbtall didn't judge me the way my roommates do. John is the worst in that regard. He doesn't seem to care about other people's feelings. My Zarbtallian friends are different, though. They accepted me even though I wasn't from Zarbtall like them. It is strange that people think I am not in touch with reality. I am. It is not like I go around telling people I am from another planet, however much I wish I were. (Word count =267) 

A Horrible Scene 

I was sleeping profoundly until I woke up in my bed. I wasn't in the mood of waking up and starting the day so I just laid in bed thinking about the dream I had about my friends from planet Zarbtall. I missed them so much that I wished I could see them again. As I was wishing my wish came true, my friends were there in a bubble above my head. I stayed upstairs talking to them until I realized Samantha wasn't in our room, everyone was having breakfast downstairs. Then I started to smell chicken. I started to worry because Fred, my pet who's a chicken, wasn't in my bedroom. I immediately got out of bed to look for Fred in every bedroom. Then, I went downstairs and I saw a horrible scene. Samantha, Mike, John and David were all there eating Fred. My poor little baby was their breakfast. I was mad and very frustrated; I came to the conclusion that John is Fred's murderer. I was very angry not just because of John but also because there wasn't any food for me. Of course, I got really mad at John. Some impolite words may have slipped from my mouth but then again, he had no right to kill Fred. I have to admit, I also got mad at John, because I assumed he was the one who finished all the toilet paper. After that fight, I went into my bedroom to calm myself down, and my friends from planet Zarbtall appeared in their floating bubble to comfort me. (Word count =265) 

Another Bad Day 

I came home from school, I was very hungry, but unfortunately, all the food I had prepared for myself had been thrown away in the garbage. I'm guessing it was John who had thrown away all the food. I hate him; he's really starting to make me go crazy. I can't believe how stupid he is. Did I mention he sleeps in a dog cage' I assume he thinks grass milkshake with tofu isn't real food and that's why he threw my food away. He should know that it's my friend's recipe and it's a very popular meal in planet Zarbtall. What if it was Mike who ate it all' Since he eats a lot and loves good food. Later on, I wanted to do an essay for my French class but Mike was playing games on my computer, because it was the only computer we had that was in good condition. All the other computers were broken that's why I couldn't do any of my work. Mike is very annoying as well as John, the house is a mess because of them. They're constantly bothering me. So I suggested to Samantha that one of them should leave because they are not respecting my personal stuff and also because we need more space. Then I complained to her about everything John and Mike had done to me like throwing my food away, killing my chicken and not letting me use my computer. Mike doesn't really seem to care much, but John thinks we all want Samantha to leave because she has a messed up virtue or she doesn't have any. (Word count =270) 

A Very Good Day 

John was bugging me, so I complained to Samantha about everything he had done to me again. I knew she would be on my side because John is against her and wants her to leave. David noticed the tension in our house so he called us for a meeting. I knew David would be on our side because he likes Samantha. Mike was on John's side because he loves free food and John always brings him food from his restaurant. During the reunion, we argued and complained a lot, but finally agreed that someone had to leave. Since we were 3 against 2 John had to start packing up. I had a big smile on my face. David was happy, because Samantha didn't have to leave, so he kissed her. Mike was the only one who was crying. (Word count = 138)

The 10 Best Grammar Checkers

I have added VirtualWritingTutor.com to an existing List.ly list. The link is here:

Best Grammar Checkers

To help you to consider the merits of the various systems in terms of addressing  English as a Second Language errors, I would like to offer examples of sentences selected from my students' writing. The best grammar checker on the list is Grammarbase with ten votes, so I submitted the sentences below to Grammarbase.com and received the message here to the right: "Congratulations! There are no critical mistakes in your writings." Judge for yourself.

After that, I had one of those bad day, everything badly begins this day. 

My school schedule is simple, everyday I start at 9 hr.

My last class of English it was in 2010.

I am studying here since two years.

I am in this program for 2 years

His mother took us there when we are young. 

I submitted this longer text, a text recently contributed by a user, and Grammarbase indicates that my text is genius level writing.

One day, I traveled to Ushuaia, but I had no idea than I would to find. I come to plane, I traveled four hours, and I arrived in Buenos Aires after, I come the second plane (the small and noisy plane) and I arrived in End of the World as the called the Ushuaia. I stayed wonder! The airport was built of wood and glass. The landscape was beautiful! The mountains and the sea together were amazing. I took the taxi and I arrived in the downtown. The city is as postcard. The homes had the European style and the diversity colours. The persons were friendly. There many activities for to make. I enjoyed a lot. The activity which I very loved was the track in the Park National. The thing very interesting was looked the evening at twenty three hours!

Please, try the samples given above on http://VirtualWritingTutor.com and then visit the List.ly list and decide which is really the best grammar checker for ESL students.

Virtual Writing Tutor Video Tour (en français)

Présentation du Virtual Writing Tutor : 

un correcteur web adapté à l'anglais langue seconde

Lien: Première édition sur Le Monde en Images

Le professeur d’anglais langue seconde, Nicholas Walker, du Collège Ahuntsic, présente l’outil web que il a créé dans le but d’assister ses étudiants francophones dans leurs travaux de rédaction. Il montre comment, du site web Virtual Writing Tutor, l’étudiant peut soumettre son texte à la correction. Il peut alors faire ses choix, à partir de suggestions de correction, et accéder à un relevé des fautes, incluant les statistiques de fréquence et les éléments de rétroaction corrective (emplacement et explication de la faute, suggestions de correction, lien vers une ressource en ligne, s’il y a lieu). L’étudiant peut imprimer son texte corrigé et y joindre le relevé.

 On peut en connaître davantage sur la démarche pédagogique de l’enseignant en faisant la lecture du récit de Profweb : « Le Virtual Writing Tutor : un correcteur web adapté à l’anglais langue seconde ». Nicholas Walker y fait valoir le fait que l’on peut varier les stratégies d’apprentissage de l’anglais langue seconde avec cet outil en intégrant un processus de révision dans les habitudes de rédaction des étudiants. L’outil permet d’augmenter la fréquence des évaluations et la précision des rétroactions tout en offrant une assistance à la rédaction tenant compte des principales faiblesses des étudiants francophones.

(Merci à Émilie Lavery !)

A Grammar Checker Fails the Test

The Virtual Writing Tutor Bombs Badly

A fellow ESL teacher recently sent me this message on Facebook about the VirtualWritingTutor, an English grammar checker for ESL learners.

I tried the VirtualWritingTutor with a text I ask my students to edit (English 100). It missed a lot of mistakes - especially with the present continuous verb forms. I think that you'll need to add even more error detection rules! 

Here's the text I tried out:

You have a pet? I do. I have a cats. It have five year old. I buy the animal for my childs. My son and daughter are very happy when they got Tommy. Tommy is the cat’s name. My son love the cat very much. He brings the cat in her bed at night and the cat sleep there. He is feeding the cat every day. Sometimes my daughter feed the cat. Last week, the cat go outside and don’t come back for two day. We not closing the door. Usually, we always close the door. This weekend, my friend is feed the cat because we going on a trip. We go at New York.

The Virtual Writing Tutor--a work in progress

Here was my reply

Thank you very much for this. Obviously, there are many more rules to write. The rules I am writing are based on authentic errors written by my own Francophone 100B and 101A students and based on the two student corpora on Lextutor.com . For some reason, the errors teachers submit to test the system almost always catch it off guard. I am not sure if it is how teachers reformulate errors from memory, the fact that different writing tasks produce a different range of errors, or just the sheer chaos of L2 writing.

In response to the text you posted, I have added a couple dozen rules to the system. Instead of catching 4 errors and throwing up false alarms, the system will now catch 17 errors in your text. Some errors I won’t try to catch simply because they involve understanding sentences that come before and after. This system is set up to look for overt sentence-level errors.

New Error Detection Rules Added

You have a pet?

I added a rule to catch the lack of an auxiliary with “You have a pet?” and a second rule for “You have pets?”

It have five year old.

I had a rule to catch “It have five years old” and many variations but not “it have five year old.” I modified the rule to catch the extra variation.

I buy the animal for my childs.

I created an exception for Childs in the proper name capitalization rule, reasoning that high frequency pluralization errors are more of a problem than low frequency family name capitalization errors. I will have to create a separate rule for the family name Childs. I created a rule to catch “childs” with the exception that it should be ignored if “childs” appears before another noun. In such a case, it will assume that the learner needs a possessive form. I won’t try to catch the “I buy” tense error. it is too broad of an assumption to expect all storytelling to use the past tense when dramatic stories can use the present simple also. More to the point, I have been focusing on sentence-level errors only.

My son and daughter are very happy when they got Tommy.

I created a rule to compare the verb at the beginning of the sentence with the verb at the end of the sentence. I have 36 of these rules so far. I’ll need many more, I figure.

My son love the cat very much.

I created an additional condition for the 3rd-person rule. It is easier to teach than to program because of the danger of false alarms. For one, you have to add an exception for the subjunctive. Also, we need an exception for all past forms, past participles, modals and infinitives that look like present simple forms.

I fixed the adjective order false alarm for “cat very much” by adding an exception that looks for a determiner before “cat”.

He brings the cat in her bed at night and the cat sleep there.

Now the system catches the third person singular error.

He is feeding the cat every day.

The system was able to catch “Every day, he is feeding the cat”. It is easier to program the system to catch aspect errors when the adverb of frequency is at the beginning or in the middle of the sentence. I have nevertheless added the new rule.

Sometimes my daughter feed the cat.

The reason the system didn’t catch “feed” is that it is also the low-frequency but nevertheless past tense of verb “to fee” which is excluded as being potentially correct. I had to create a separate rule for “feed”.

Last week, the cat go outside and don’t come back for two day.

This one was tough because of the two verb errors, but I have cracked it. I’ll need to develop more rules along this line.

This weekend, my friend is feed the cat because we going on a trip.

This was helpful for me. I set up a new group of rules to deal with future plans and arrangements. The second part was simply a case of catching a missing auxiliary after “because,” a case that is very unlikely to be a question with auxiliary-fronting

Stumping the Virtual Writing Tutor

Do you have any error-correction activities or sentences that stump the VirtualWritingTutor? If you do, please share them by adding them in a comment below. I will certainly add any missing rules in short order.