Digital Support for Teaching Punctuation in Academic Writing in English

Abstract

Background. Academic writing skills are crucial to the enterprise of higher education, because much of the academic communication is in writing. As a rule, foreign language learners face different problems with vocabulary misuse, grammatical errors, spelling, capitalization, punctuation and some others when write academic texts in English. There are various technologies for solving these problems. One of them is digital support, because traditional types of academic writing instruction in the classroom are not always sufficient.
 Purpose. The present study researches the influence of digital support on students’ knowledge and punctuation skills in academic writing in English.
 Methods. The paper summarizes the results of an empirical study: training punctuation in academic writing lessons for two groups of students. The control group was applied a face-to-face and a text-book based traditional methodology. The experimental group was trained not only with a basic text-book but also with digital support. The level of knowledge and abilities in punctuation were measured with three final tests.
 Results. The results obtained indicate that digital support has significant didactic potential that is why it should be applied permanently in academic writing training process.

Uncovering EFL students’ frequent difficulties in academic writing and the coping strategies: The case of a college in Indonesia

“…Shweba and Mujiyanto (2017) reported learning and following spelling, capitalization, and punctuation rules can lead to high-quality writing to construct a meaningful paragraph. In contrast, some students believe that learning spelling, punctuation, and capitalization from textbooks is insufficient and that instead of merely receiving teacher explanations and examples from student textbooks, they also need to be supported by digital resources such as training videos and other digital text resources (Ivanova et al, 2022).…”

Constraints Based Behaviours in EFL Mastery of English Education Students

“…The activities of writing skill are least since the learners are afraid of making errors even though have selfconficence in encoding ideas visually. "As a rule, foreign language learners face different problems with vocabulary misuse, grammatical errors, spelling, capitalization, punctuation and some others when write academic texts in English" (Ivanova et al, 2022). A non-native English student often produces errors in using the target language.…”

“…However, those errors should be corrected wisely by her teacher (Muslem et al, 2021). Correct spelling, grammar and punctuation are key factors in written communication (Ivanova et al, 2022). The affective fluctuation is also hard to control since it integrates the individual's own personality and emotional management with the surroundings (Ma et al, 2022).…”