EverWrite

Question: To what extent do you think EeverWrite is an effective material for language teaching/ learning? Evaluate in the light of the language learning theories that you are familiar with.

EverWrite provides interactive writing-process and rhetorical exercises.  This program takes students/ learners through six major subjects: Editing Exercises, Identifying Rhetorical Paragraphs, Working with Transitions, Organizing Your Thoughts, Recognizing Your Thesis Statements, and Practicing Grammar.  Each section has practice exercises followed by post-tests.

Students edit paragraphs, highlight transitions, and identify topic sentences among a variety of other exercises. The program also offers so many grammar exercises.  EverWrite is an excellent resource for students who want to improve their English grammar and writing skills. This program increases student academic performance and help students to acquire study skills. There are so many exercises under Editing Exercises: Adjectives & adverbs, Apostrophes, Coherence, The commas, Coordination and Subordination, Look-alikes/ Sound-alikes, Nouns, The past participle, Past tense, Prepositions, Pronouns, Revising for consistency and parallelism, Spelling, subject-verb agreement, Writing paragraphs etc. Anyone can easily practice the sessions and also takes part in post-test items. The instruction is very clear and anyone can easily understand what to do. For each and every practice session there are options to select the correct answer. After selecting the correct answer he/she will get the feedback and also the reason why it is correct. Therefore, without knowing the right answer if anyone clicks on the correct answer unintentionally, he/she will be able to learn the role/ grammatical role for that specific correct answer.  However, Revising for consistency & parallelism and Subject-verb agreement seems to me the same. I think it could be presented differently. Editing exercises and practicing grammar are also more or less same except 2/3 items. These are very important for the learners. Without internet connection they can exercise all the items and improve their English. These programs help learners to develop critical thinking. It improves their reading skills. Spelling correction, Sentence organization, making story, comma splices and all the grammatical items included in EverWriting are the most beneficial for the learners. Without the help of a teacher the learners will also be able to learn the entire thing if he /she become serious about it. The teachers can also be benefitted through this program. Teacher can prepare materials getting help from these programs. They can also use this material in their classes and also take a test on the post-test items. Therefore, it can be said that EverWrite is the most effective and important material for language teaching and learning.

The level of this material has not been mentioned. However, it seems to me the material is for the secondary and intermediate level learners. Even anyone can also take help from this material. The example of practice and test items are arranged in such a way that the learners will learn/ acquire English/English grammar easily. EverWrite supports Krashen’s acquisition–learning hypothesis. The acquisition–learning hypothesis claims that there is a strict separation between acquisition and learning. Krashen saw acquisition as a purely subconscious process and learning as a conscious process, and claimed that improvement in language ability was only dependent upon acquisition and never on learning. Learning cannot ‘become’ acquisition. However, I do believe that some rules can be acquired through learning.

Jean Piaget’s is not innate not nativist but interaction with the environment. His theory focuses not only on understanding how children acquire knowledge, but also on understanding the nature of intelligence. His theory of cognitive development suggests that children move through four different stages of mental development. The final stage of cognitive development is known as the formal operational stage (adolescence and into adulthood, roughly ages 11 to approximately 15-20): Intelligence is demonstrated through the logical use of symbols related to abstract concepts. At this point, the person is capable of hypothetical and deductive reasoning. During this time, people develop the ability to think about abstract concepts. EverWrite helps learner to learn logically because by clicking on correct answer they get the reason behind that specific reason.

EverWrite is also based upon constructivism one of the modern theories in teaching language theory. Constructivist theory focuses on learning by doing and learning through technology.

Finally, it can be said that EverWrite is really a very good and fantastic program/resource for the learner and teacher for learning and teaching language.