The main software text for the course is Success With Writing (Scholastic) which has been available for a number of years. Although the underlying thrust of the software is in the right direction, there are a number of drawbacks which have become apparent. Axiomatic to the course are some acronyms. "PACE" is the main one, where the initials stand for "Prewriting, Arranging, Composing, and Evaluating." Each of these stages has its own menu item.
The various "Prewriting" exercises are intended to emphasise fluency and encourage the writer not to be overly concerned with grammar or spelling, which both come in at a later stage. The "Freewriting" activity shows one area where the computer has an advantage over the pen: the writer is not able to delete or backspace. This surprises many at first, but writers soon turn it to their advantage, and increased fluency of ideas is the result. Not only can the writer not edit the work, but if she pauses for more than a breath, a message appears urging her to keep working. This has finally succeeded in moving students beyond the "write one word, think about it, then erase it and start again" strategy.
The "Arrange" menu contains templates for many types of composition, including "Narrative Essay," "Persuasive Essay," "Descriptive Essay," and "Book Report." Upon choosing one, the writer works through a series of appropriate questions and sorting operations, and is rewarded with an essay plan. In most of the exercises, the TAG system is emphasised (Topic, Audience, Goal), and these are often the first three questions. Then, the main categories are entered, with supporting details added in turn. The writer is often asked for six examples, which can take some time to think up, although the program seems limited, and the writer is forced to select the best two in each case.
One drawback of this kind of "pattern essay" is clear: it is inflexible. However, the force with which this takes the writers away from Japanese rhetorical structures makes this still worthwhile at second-year level. A more serious drawback, however, lies in the programming, which does not allow work to be saved until the end point. This, in combination with a clumsily placed "Cancel" button that can delete the whole document, makes it easy for students to lose their work. This generally happens once per lesson.
Having printed out the arranged essay plan, students proceed to the composing stage. The program contains a basic word processor, although we tend to use more sophisticated programs instead. Evaluating is a very subjective matter, and computers have limited ability in this at present. Numerical aspects come easily though, and there are plenty of these, including a corpus function, average word count, word length, and number of words per sentence/ paragraph. More mysterious is the "Approximate Readability Level," which appears to be a combination of the other statistics. However, measures of this kind are highly suspect at best, and can even become detrimental to writing if used out of context. For example, the average word-count per sentence may represent different styles rather than readability levels, and the computer is, at present, blind to these.
Other evaluation tools range in usefulness. The "Cliches" command searches for pre-programmed idioms, and allows the writer to replace these. The double word search finds instances of double words, typed in error, although this is perhaps included more for its ease of programming than its real utility. A spelling checker would have been considerably more useful. Unfortunately, none of the evaluation results can be saved into a text file, which is a little surprising, although they can be printed.
Note that the accompanying text book has not been mentioned in this review. This is because it is clearly intended for teenage native speakers in both tone and language, and is not really appropriate for Japanese college students. The strength of the package lies in using the software itself, rather than struggling with the book's rubric and exercises.
Although there are some minor flaws and omissions with the program,
it remains an excellent piece of software which goes a long way to providing
a basis for process writing at a lower level. I sincerely hope that the
publishers decide to reprogram this package, using state-of-the-art technology.
Paul Lewis, Aichi Shukutoku Junior College, is the JALT CALL N-SIG's Telecommunications Chair and is Assistant Editor of The Language Teacher.