Online Tutoring System for Essay Writing

Developed by Dawson College’s Academic Skills Centre with the support of the Collegial Centre for Educational Materials Development (Centre Collégial de développement de matériel didactique – CCDMD) to provide students with computer-assisted tutoring to improve their essay writing skills.

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Online Tutoring System for Essay Writing (OTSEW) is a set of online learning modules that focus on two sets of skills:

  • sentence structure
  • essay organization
  • to provide students who have weak essay-writing abilities with the skills they need to write effectively at the college level
  • the primary users will be ESL students, allophones and anglophones whose English writing skills are lower than CEGEP level
  • those using OTSEW have a basic knowledge of English grammar and usage, but need tutoring to become more fluent and effective in their writing

Development Team

  • Denis Daigneault, Co-author: Education Advisor, Dawson College Academic Skills Centre
  • Yu Miao, Co-author: Lecturer in ESL at Concordia University, Writing Tutor, Dawson College Academic Skills Centre
  • Véronica Gill, Project Coordinator: English Sector, CCDMD
  • Valerie Paterson, Project Manager: Educational Advisor, CCDMD
  • Gilles Bergeron, Programmer: Synapse Multimedia
  • Maureen Newman, Content Advisor: English Teacher, Champlain College

Glossary

  • basic definition of a grammatical term along with examples
  • source for one-line definitions appearing as text tips in the program when a new term is introduced

Parts of Speech

  • background for students who may need to review this basic knowledge
  • to show them how to write good English sentences, not to provide instruction in grammar

Units

  • units can be used selectively following a diagnosis by a writing tutor, Education Advisor, or teacher
  • the sequence has been designed to provide continuity from basic sentence structures to increasingly difficult concepts related to meaning, form and use

Content

  • The sequence moves from the semantic definition of a sentence as something that expresses a complete thought
  • through the syntactic treatment of the structures of sentences from the easiest to the most difficult
  • to essay writing: paragraphs, organization, unity and coherence Units

Practice

Each unit has four components:

  • explanation deals with the conceptual and formal aspects of a structure
  • examples illustrate conceptual and formal points
  • activities that put the structure to use in context using text, voice, animation and interactivity
  • test the student’s grasp of the structure in both conceptual and formal aspects and the ability to use the structure in various contexts
  • quizzes at the end of each unit provide an overview

Access the program
Access an article on OTSEW at PROFWEB



Last Modified: April 4, 2016