Self-assessment of academic writing in an online learning environment

Abstract

Successful academic writing courses include self-assessment opportunities for foreign language learners. Encouraging students to actively engage with their own texts is even more relevant when courses are offered in a hybrid or entirely online learning environment. During distance education, when measuring learning is becoming problematic, students reflecting on and experimenting with their work can inform the teacher, but more importantly, can promote a deeper understanding of the writing process and the written product. An effective revision and self-editing of a draft requires top-down and bottom-up approaches to the text. This study discusses how students can assess their own writing on three levels: lexically, syntactically, and at the discourse level by incorporating corpus linguistic tools in their self-assessment process. This includes vocabulary profiling, evaluating cohesion and analysing variation in register and genres. The exercises are beneficial in undergraduate language courses and also in teacher and translator training.