Information for Teachers

ItalianChecker is a great tool to help your students improve their writing abilities in Italian. In order to benefit fully from the site's ability to identify errors, we ask that you keep the following points in mind:

1) ItalianChecker is inspired by a process-writing approach to learning. Students should approach the writing task in stages. When using ItalianChecker, have your students submit a text, correct the errors, and then resubmit their work. This is important since ItalianChecker requires certain errors to be fixed before it will point out other ones. For example, if a student writes i cosa, only the number error will be highlighted initially. Once this change is made, the error concerning gender will be caught. It is through a series of interactions like this that students will make the greatest progress and that ItalianChecker will be most successful at identifying errors. Recent research shows that students make better progress when they are not overwhelmed by an excessive number of errors to correct.

2) ItalianChecker will not catch 100% of errors (nor will the average teacher!). It is a learning tool that is designed to help improve texts, not make them flawless (that's where you, the teacher, come in!). We therefore suggest that ItalianChecker be used for all first drafts and that your writing program include a two-stage correction (first by ItalianChecker, and then by the teacher).

3) The Pro version of ItalianChecker is particularly well-suited to helping learners. We say this because it has the following features:

• It allows students to submit long texts, without the distraction of advertising
• It gives students a detailed summary of their errors
• It provides interactive exercises that are linked to the actual errors a student makes
• It allows students to keep a writing portfolio

The Pro version is available for a minimal fee of $249 for a classroom of up to 30 students (that's about 8$ per student!). We can arrange to have a site license for computer labs (direct access based on IP addresses), or self-registration groups (that allow students to manage their own profiles). Please contact us at mail@nadaclair.com for more information. You can create a free trial account of ItalianChecker Pro and use it for up to 5 days.

We encourage teachers to have students use ItalianChecker systematically prior to handing in their text. One way of verifying this is to simply ask them to print off a screen shot of their final submission to ItalianChecker. We know that not all students enter the Italian writing process with the same abilities. However, they should approach this important task with the same level of responsibility. ItalianChecker is one tool that will allow them to improve their texts substantially before requesting feedback from their teacher.

As always, feel free to contact us with any questions or comments.

The ItalianChecker team,

Dr. Terry Nadasdi & Dr. Stéfan Sinclair