Developing a web-based application as a tool to facilitate teacher-inquiry of learner corpus

Abstract

This SUG project to determine whether a web-based application better facilitated teacher- inquiry into students’ writing as opposed to manual marking and coding, was situated within a project titled ‘Investigating writing in a primary school’ (IRB Application Code IRB-2017-03- 018, herafter referred to as the IRB project. This IRB project involved i) the review of the current EL P5 writing package of a particular primary school, ii) data collection involving sample student scripts collected at intervention and post intervention stages, iii) grammar coding of students' compositions and iv) reflections from the teacher-producers of the writing package. Through the analysis of student scripts, it aimed to identify the areas of grammar that could be explicitly embedded into the writing package.<br> A web-based application for the electronic grammatical-tagging of the students’ writing was developed under the SUG project. In order to determine whether such a web-based application, as opposed to manual marking and coding, facilitated teacher-inquiry into student writing, the teachers manually grammatically-coded the student scripts at the intervention stage and electronically grammatically-tagged the student scripts via the web- based application at the post-intervention stage of the IRB project.