Abstract
In order to ensure that preservice teachers are able to write at the correct academic level, many different writing support programmes have been developed by universities all over the world. This paper will address preservice teachers’ perceptions of the implementation of an online academic writing program called Skryfhulp, which is an academic writing assistant (AWA) that has been developed by the Leuven Language Institute in Belgium and focusses specifically on improving writing skills in Afrikaans. The AWA program emphasises the use of a spell checker orientated word list (SCOWL), identifying language errors in students’ writing and highlighting problems with tense use and adverbial phrases. Furthermore, the program assists writers with sentence cohesion and coherence, and makes suggestions related to genre style. This study is contextualised within a faculty of education at a university in the Western Cape, where the AWA Skryfhulp has been implemented as a writing support tool in both language orientated subjects and content subjects within the Bachelor of Education degree.
The purpose of this project was to determine the perceptions of students who had used Skryfhulp and this was done in order to offer suggestions for the improvement of the program and identify the benefits and challenges of using the program to improve the writing skills of the students in this study. This project employed a sequential exploratory mixed method approach which comprised two distinct phases of data collection. The reason for employing a mixed method approach was to use the qualitative data to tease out the themes exposed in the quantitative phase. During the first phase of this study, a quantitative online survey was disseminated to 133 pre-service teachers in a Bachelor of Education degree at a university in the Western Cape, who had used Skryfhulp. 89 of these pre-service teachers agreed to take part in this study as they had used the AWA and were familiar with it, thus they felt confident in proceeding with the completion of the survey. This quantitative phase was then followed by a qualitative phase where open-ended interviews were used to interview 18 participants. The participants in the qualitative phase were sampled using purposive sampling. The criterion used to sample these participants was that they had to have used Skryfhulp extensively and be willing to be interviewed. Once they had been purposively selected, the participants were informed that participation was voluntary and that they could withdraw from the interview process at any time.
Data gleaned from the quantitative phase of the study was analysed using descriptive statistics and relied on frequencies which were expressed in percentages. The qualitative phase of the data analysis used Saldaña’s (2013) thematic analysis approach and themes were then reported. The data revealed a number of themes and these were related to the user-friendliness of the program, the ability to access the program, the value of highlighting grammatical conventions, challenges experienced and recommendations for the implementation and use of the program.
The majority of the pre-service teachers found that Skryfhulp was very user-friendly and was easy to access. It helped them specifically with spelling, grammar and sentence construction in the writing of academic texts. It was also noted that the program helped participants make their sentences more readable. Interestingly enough, the participants indicated that the program did not help them as successfully with word meaning, passive constructions and general sentence meaning. The participants also indicated that access to the program should be available to all levels of students, from first year to Honours and beyond, and that first-year students should be able to use it extensively. Afrikaans Home Language preservice teachers gave positive feedback on their use of the program in the subject Afrikaans Home Language and overall, this study has found that the incorporation of Skryfhulp in academic subjects like Professional Studies and Education was also beneficial in improving participants’ writing ability, highlighting that this program can be used successfully in subjects other than the traditional language subjects.
Even though participants generally agreed that the program was easy to use certain challenges related to the technical aspects of the program were identified. Participants indicated that it was difficult to copy and paste from MS Word into Skryfhulp, and then to copy and paste back into MS Word. It was also noted that the program often underlined words and indicated that they were misspelt, when in actual fact they were not. This may relate to the fact that Skryfhulp was originally written in Dutch and has been translated into Afrikaans. A further challenge that was identified was that the program often did not indicate where specific problems were to be found in the text, but simply offered hints and tips on how to improve writing. Finally, many participants indicated that remote learning made it difficult to access the program as they had to rely on their own data, which was limited and expensive.
The final theme identified in this study relates to recommendations made by the participants. The participants indicated that further support in the use of the program could be offered in the form of instructional videos. Another recommendation made related to one of the challenges identified. The participants noted that faulty sentences could be underlined and that alternative options of better sentences could be given to them. They also recommended that a dictionary be included in the program and that the glossary should be broadened. There were instances of students not knowing how some of the functions worked. Finally, it was suggested that the program should have a “save” function so that the document could be saved online and downloaded when the participant had completed the editing process.
This study thus found that the AWA, Skryfhulp, has been successfully included in the Bachelor of Education degree and has had a positive influence on the academic writing ability of the participants in this study. Bearing in mind that there are technical errors that need to be rectified within the program, the potential for the ongoing successful use of this program is apparent.
Keywords: academic writing assistant; Afrikaans; discourse markers; grammar; passive construction; punctuation; repetition; Skryfhulp; spelling; writing; word meaning
- The photo on this article’s featured image was taken by Nick Morrison and obtained from Unsplash.