ACADEMIC WRITING WIZARD: A NEW APPLICATION FOR TEACHING ACADEMIC WRITING USING LEXICAL COHESIVE TRIO

Academic Writing Wizard, AWW, is a new web-based application that helps teachers and students alike in achieving their academic goals easily and effectively. AWW helps students plan, organize, write, and edit their academic essays using a new idea in teaching academic writing, Lexical Cohesive Trio. AWW provides teachers with an exceptional environment to assign essays, receive students’ essays, mark them, and provide a comprehensive feedback on every single paragraph. Teaching academic writing is a laborious and daunting experience, especially for non-native speakers of English.
I believe that making non-native students aware of phraseological routines in English can considerably improve their academic writing. Lexis has a very important position in English. Lexical clustering is reflective of behavioural and interactional routines applied by English native speakers. By the time non-native speakers of English master their grammatical and spelling skills, they find themselves trapped in a more intricate web of lexical relations, about which they are not aware. This lack of knowledge would result in spending a great deal of time in mastering these lexical relationships. Several modern studies of corpora have proved that native lexical combinations of phrases are limited, and they can be directly taught to students. My argument in this presentation is that direct and conscious teaching of such lexical relations and phrases, using Lexical Cohesive Trio, can pave the way for more effective writing skills, and it will definitely reduce the amount of time educators spend later in teaching their students these indispensable skills.