eWriting, a fully online ESL writing lab program in six levels, increases students’ writing competence, preparing them to pass the writing section of exams such as the College Placement Test, to write successfully, and to compete for grades with native speakers of the language in college-level classes. The final eWriting product is a six-level, multimedia, modularized, content-rich, competency-based, interactive, online ESL writing lab program with over 250 one-hour lessons. It was developed at Miami Dade College (MDC), and is currently used by approximately 10,000 students per year. The content of the online materials encompass the six levels of writing objectives that have been developed and refined over the past 30 years at MDC. Course materials have been designed and developed by MDC faculty with help from graphic designers and technology experts.
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eWriting was developed at the Kendall Campus of Miami Dade College (MDC) in Florida.
The overall goal of eWriting is to significantly improve the writing skills of ESL students by creating a fully online writing lab program in six levels. The Learning Objects cover ESL writing competencies as well as grammar, sentence skills, and paragraph development.
The flexibility of the eWriting program design will permit instructors to create and customize a writing curriculum by selecting the objectives that meet their students’ needs. They can opt to deliver the material over the Web, in a lab setting, or in the classroom using the materials as a full course or just course support.
Each ESL lesson, or Learning Object (LO), is a one-hour, self-contained unit of on-line instruction that teaches one discreet learning objective. An LO does not link out to other lessons, nor does it depend on other LOs for instructional purposes. Each LO presents the students with up to three segments of instruction. Each segment consists of a movie, followed by a print lecture, self-tests, interactive activities (including cloze, crossword, multiple choice, fill-ins, drag/drop) and a final writing task. Targeted prescriptive feedback is provided to ESL students for each incorrect guess they make on activities throughout the lesson. The material is designed to appeal to all learning styles.
The upper four levels of eWriting are appropriate for both native and non-native English-speaking high schools students as well as College Prep students.
Contact person:
Judith Garcia, Chairperson of ESL & Foreign Languages
jgarcia@mdc.edu
305 237-2434
eWriting: ESL Writing Success was Funded by the US Department of Education’s Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE), US Department of Education
Brett Sherman (Faculty)