Expanding Students’ Registerial Repertoire with a Writing Assistance Tool

Proficiency in English academic writing is critical to students’ success at university. With recent advances in language technology, a computer-assisted language learning approach can potentially provide students with additional practice and feedback. We describe our effort in building a tool that promotes greater awareness of how students can expand their registerial repertoire by employing grammatical metaphor, in particular through feedback on the lexico-grammatical options in the nominalization of clauses. An empirical study shows that this tool can help university students produce grammatically appropriate nominalization. Finally, we present detailed analysis on students’ common errors when attempting nominalization.