This chapter reviews some of the problems in manual and automatic feedback to student writing and describes software tools I have developed to address some of these problems. The purpose of these tools is to encourage learners to look up language patterns and other information in online resources as they write and revise and to help teachers guide their students in using these resources effectively as writing aids.

The wider goal of this approach is to provide novice writers the means to access comprehensive and targeted input and to assist teachers to guide students in exploring appropriate resources and thus to become less dependent on their teachers' support. The tools are designed to improve students' linguistic performance and competence in the EFL context of Hong Kong, but the methodology may be helpful for novice writers in general and for teachers of other languages and subjects when responding to student texts.

Theoretical issues and practical constraints in form-focused feedback

In spite of criticisms of form-focused feedback, (e.g., Krashen, 1982; Truscott, 1996), second language acquisition (SLA) researchers increasingly appear to recognize that language acquisition is optimized when learners attend to both meaning and form (e.g., Doughty & Varela, 1998; Ellis, 2002). However, the drive to provide form-focused feedback is discouraging to many language teachers, especially in foreign language (FL) contexts, who are compelled by educational and social pressures to spend the greater part of their time in what often seems a fruitless attempt to eradicate interlanguage errors at the sentence level (Tsui, 1996).