Spellchecking as part of language pedagogy

[Richard Robin]

Dear SEELANGers,

I would like to get a read on how people feel about the idea of background
spellchecking on Russian language exercise sites. The standard argument for
spellchecking is that it weeds out “stupid” errors or true typos as they are
being made. Those against say spellchecking makes things too easy.

In the spellchecking scenario I am imagining, students complete a somewhat
open-ended exercise online, e.g. “Indicate that Masha doesn’t have a car.”
But that idea could produce seven correct answers with the same words “У Маши
нет машины” just through word order variation alone. Such an exercise would
require human checking, but an add-on spellchecker would catch some common
errors, such as hard/soft endings and spelling-rule issues.

Other fill-in exercises might have as-you-type spellcheck correction plus
full auto-correction once the SUBMIT button is pressed.

At what point do we ask if the machine is helping too much too fast?

What other arguments for and against are out there? How do people come down
on this issue?

Thanks,
Rich Robin


-- 
Richard M. Robin, Ph.D.
Director Russian Language Program
The George Washington University
Washington, DC 20052
202-994-7081
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Russkiy tekst v UTF-8

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