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Home » Publications » Nicholas Walker

Publication by Nicholas Walker

About the Author

He is a prize-winning teacher at Ahuntsic College and textbook author of the Actively Engaged Series. In 2017, he won the TESL Canada Innovation Award and later the same year received a Sesquicentennial Pin Award for Leadership in Education from the Hon. Melanie Joly. In June of 2019, Nicholas was awarded the AQPC Mention d’Honneur for teaching excellence and then in August the Reconnaisance Institutionelle from Ahuntsic College for his work on the Virtual Writing Tutor grammar checker. In November, he won the Keith Boeckner Award for his outstanding contributions to the ESL community in Quebec.

Real Life Stories

Published May 30, 2010

Moodle Correction Perfection

Nicholas Walker Teacher, Collège Ahuntsic

Moodle can do a better job providing corrective feedback on writing errors than hand coding on MS Word through a repurposing of the standard glossary.

English (Second Language)

Articles

Vwt

Published January 14, 2020

Automatic Essay Evaluation with the Virtual Writing Tutor

Nicholas Walker Teacher, Collège Ahuntsic
Frank Bonkowski, PhD. Teacher, Cégep de Saint-Laurent

It’s the week before the beginning of the semester and you are finalizing your course plan. How many writing assignments will you assign this semester? Will you assign one midterm essay and one final essay like your colleagues, or will you assign more?

English (Second Language)

Articles

8 grammar tools

Published May 17, 2018

8 Online Grammar Checker Tools Sent Back from the Future

Nicholas Walker Teacher, Collège Ahuntsic

You probably already know that grammar checkers have come a long way in terms of coverage and eliminating pesky false-alarms. I previously highlighted 10 benefits of using such a grammar checker, the Virtual Writing Tutor, with students. This follow-up article focuses on an additional 8 fresh new learning tools, which seem to have been sent back from the future. It is impressive what a little artificial intelligence can now do for ESL learners. Here is a short list that is sure to contain at least a few surprises.

English (Second Language)

Articles

Virtual tutor

Published March 23, 2018

10 Reasons to Use a Grammar Checker with College Students

Nicholas Walker Teacher, Collège Ahuntsic

When students went on strike in 2012, a colleague and I used the extra time to launch a free online grammar checker website for our English Second Language college students. Now, after 6 years of development, the Virtual Writing Tutor is in its third incarnation. To see some of its evolution, see earlie stories about the development of this grammar checker published on Profweb in 2013. Better-looking, more powerful, and more accurate than ever before, it has attracted the interest of researchers and has corrected the writing of nearly a million learners from 211 countries. Here are 10 reasons why ESL teachers should consider using the Virtual Writing Tutor grammar checker with their college ESL students.

Multidisciplinary

Real Life Stories

Published January 13, 2013

The Virtual Writing Tutor

Nicholas Walker Teacher, Collège Ahuntsic

The Virtual Writing Tutor is a new and interesting online resource for computer-assisted error correction in English writing. Improving the quantity or frequency of feedback, as well as its timeliness, quality and detail, benefits students while reducing the time and tedium involved in correcting large numbers of assignments for teachers of ESL.

English (Second Language)