Technology for 

Teaching English
as a Second Language (ESL) Writing
JOEL BLOCH

­Framing the Issue

It has often been argued that research into the relationship between technology
and writing began with Plato’s observation in Phaedrus that the invention of
writing had a negative effect on memory. Socrates says to Phaedrus about writ-
ing that “[t]he specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but
to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of
truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they
will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tire-
some company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.” Plato discusses
here many of the issues that are still being discussed today — the gains and
losses that technology brings to the writing classroom, the impact of technology
on writing, and the possibilities of technology as a learning tool. Today, when we
see headlines like “Google makes us stupid” (Carr, 2011), we can not only see a
similar concern but also the ongoing interest in how technology makes writing
different.
In the following 2000 years, the relationship between technology and writing
has evolved, to use the terms of evolutionary biology, both punctuated and con-
servative. However, it has evolved at different rates in different cultures, often
adding new approaches and features while retaining traditional ones. For exam-
ple, the invention of moveable type in China occurred around the same period as
the development of the examination system and the invention of the printing press
in the West has been credited for spurring the availability of bibles for the general
population.
Hundreds of years later, the development of Web 2.0 (Berners-Lee, 1999) has
similarly been credited with fostering an equally important shift in the nature of
literacy and how writing is taught by making it easier for the creation of new
forms of digital literacies and their distribution to often unlimited audiences. More

The TESOL Encyclopedia of English Language Teaching, First Edition.

Edited by John I. Liontas (Project Editor: Margo DelliCarpini).
© 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2018 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
DOI: 10.1002/9781118784235.eelt0440

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 2 Technology for Teaching English as a Second Language (ESL) Writing

recently, the development of new forms of teaching and learning, as found in

MOOCs (Krause & Lowe, 2014) and hybrid classrooms (Bergman & Sams, 2012),
has further pushed the evolution of technology and teaching writing.
The use of technology in the teaching of writing can therefore be seen as evolv-
ing in three directions: as a tool for helping with traditional forms of literacy, as a
rhetorical space for new forms of digital literacy, and as a new approach to teach-
ing and learning to be literate. Particularly at a time when writing teachers are
exploring how writers move among various forms of literacies, both inside and
outside the classroom, understanding the role of technology in this process has
become more important.
The groundwork for these often dramatic changes in the use of technology can
be traced to the period after World War II when groups of scientists and engineers
worked together in the development of technologies that would later lead to the
personal computer, hypertext, computer networks, the Internet, and the World
Wide Web, as well as many other technologies that would impact the learning and
teaching of writing. While few of these technologies would be developed specifi-
cally for the teaching of writing, many would be absorbed and exploited in the
writing classroom.
At the same time as these technologies were being developed, there were equally
dramatic changes in how writing was being taught. These changes were encapsu-
lated in the term “process approach,” and while the teaching methodologies were
not monolithic, the integration of the technologies with the changes in teaching
approaches would have a dramatic impact on both teaching and learning to write.
The process approach was divided into different phases, which were later inte-
grated with each other and contextualized in various social spheres. The concur-
rent developments in technology facilitated every aspect of the process approaches.
The personal computer rapidly replaced the typewriter as the dominant method
for drafting. Ways to help in the planning phases included outlining programs and
question & answer programs, both designed to help writers generate ideas before
starting to write.
The greatest initial impact of technology may have been on the revision process.
Instead of having to retype the entire paper, writers could edit their papers online
and then either print them out or, with the development of networks, send them to
their instructors or peers for commenting. Revision was also an interesting area to
study in terms of how writers with different backgrounds approached the writing
process. Older writers who were more used to typewriting might print out hard
copies of their papers and then revise on the screen. As more and more writers
were learning to write on the computer, these writers were more comfortable both
transcribing, reading, and revising on screen. As the quote from Plato would pre-
dict, the nature of the technology had its own impact on the writing process. The
small screens on some of the first personal computers allowed the writer to see
only a limited view of the text (Haas, 1996); as the screens became larger, and
­writers became more comfortable with revising online, they could adopt revision
strategies that allowed for more frequent, and sometimes more focused, ways
of writing comments.

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 Technology for Teaching English as a Second Language (ESL) Writing 3

One of the areas where the convergence of writing theory and technology was
most evident was in the development of what were called social-cognitive theo-
ries of writing. The original process approaches were criticized for ignoring social
aspects of the writing process. The development of ever-expanding networks,
from the classroom to the world, would facilitate this social process so that writ-
ing could be shared within the classroom, outside the classroom, and eventually
anywhere in the world. The later development of technologies such as wikis or
file-sharing programs such as Google Docs, would further facilitate social
interactions.
The revision process was also facilitated both by the addition of new affor-
dances to older technologies and by the development of new supplemental
technologies. Word processing programs would include “commenting” features
that allowed written feedback to be typed in, both solving the often vexing
handwriting problem and allowing for the entire process to be online. Macros
allowed for the automation of comments so they can be more easily and consist-
ently used. Screen recording applications allowed for comments to be given
orally and lecture capture software allowed for the entire commenting process
to be saved and shared.

­Making the Case

The development of the Internet changed not only how writers could interact
with each other and how teachers and students could interact, but also the mode
in which they interacted. The Internet changed many oral interactions into writ-
ten ones and older forms of written interactions into faster, more frequent, more
open, and often more permanent ones. Telephone calls and face-to-face conver-
sations could be replaced by emails, listservs and discussion boards, a develop-
ment that some felt brought both gains and losses, as Plato might have predicted.
Many have pointed to the development of what has been called Web 2.0 as one
of the most significant events in the relationship between technology and writ-
ing. The differences between Web 2.0 and Web 1.0 have often been discussed
(e.g., O’Reilley, 2005). These changes are often compared in importance to the
invention of moveable type and the printing press. As one of its inventors, Tim
Berners-Lee (1999), has argued that Web 2.0 was purposely designed to foster
participation in the creation of web content rather than merely its consumption,
a design change that many composition teachers have been excited to imple-
ment. One of the immediate changes was in the creation of new rhetorical spaces
for writing.
The development of these writing spaces greatly accelerated with the develop-
ment of Web 2.0. Many of the literacies on Web 2.0 differed from those found on
Web 1.0. As O’Reilly pointed out, one of the best examples of this distinction was
the difference between traditional encyclopedias and Wikipedia. Traditional ency-
clopedias could be moved to the Internet and updated more frequently than their
print versions, but they remained controlled and “gated,” modified only by those

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 4 Technology for Teaching English as a Second Language (ESL) Writing

whom the encyclopedia company designated and open only to those who paid the
subscription. Wikipedia, as has been the case with wikis in general, was developed
collaboratively. Anyone could contribute and edit, and more importantly, every-
one could read it.

­Pedagogical Implications

Teachers can be often overwhelmed by the abundance of technologies available

for ESL teaching. It is commonly advised that the use of technology be driven by
their use for solving problems rather than the nature of technology itself. Therefore,
it is critical for teachers to develop a framework for determining which technology
is best suited for solving the problems they face in the classroom. Blogs, Twitter,
and Facebook provided writers with an additional variety of new writing spaces.
As Plato might have also predicted the structure of these spaces also impacted the
types of literacy they produced.
While Twitter and blogs shared a similar architecture, the limitations on the
amount of text tweets produced greatly affected Twitter’s literacy role and how it
could be used in the classroom. The interactive nature of Twitter and blogs could
both be used, for example, as a heuristic for developing ideas that could be shared
by other members of the class but often in different ways. Twitter was more useful
for sharing many underdeveloped ideas, making it a useful tool for brainstorming;
blogs allowed for more thoughtful development of ideas in more depth, and there-
fore were useful as prewriting exercises and even for the creation of texts that
could be incorporated into traditional writing assignments or borrowed by other
students as they would borrow traditional texts.
Web 2.0 also has supported the creation and distribution of new literacies (Kress,
2003; New London Group, 1996). One of the most powerful examples of this can
be seen in the growing importance of multimedia, which could be more easily
created and shared in a Web 2.0 environment. Here again, multimedia has long
been important although often seen a static interaction between an image and a
piece of text fixed on a page. Even in the Web 1.0 environment, webpages provided
teachers with the opportunity to explore a more dynamic relationship between
text, image, font, color, and layout, although this often required extensive techno-
logical skills.
The explosion in multimedia literacies was similarly facilitated by the develop-
ment of new technologies that allowed users to transform various modes of print,
aural, and visual texts into new creations. Podcasts allowed users to transform a
written text into an aural text, which could then be easily shared across a network.
Facebook was not only a space for writing but also for posting pictures. Other
technologies allowed the users to collect, remix, transform, and share their ideas
across the Internet. Such remixes could be then posted to sites such as YouTube or
Vimeo, which exponentially increase the audience beyond the teacher and the
classroom, a pedagogical goal that—as has frequently been the case—far preceded
the development of these technologies.

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 Technology for Teaching English as a Second Language (ESL) Writing 5

Many of these forms of literacy were not designed for the classroom or school
setting. Likewise, remixing various modes of expression was not designed for the
teaching of writing but writing teachers could easily find its relevance. Teachers of
academic writing, for whom remixing texts was an essential part of their curricu-
lum, could see in multimodal remixing opportunities to push the genres they were
teaching into new directions and to reflect on the same remix process that aca-
demic writing had always employed but from a different, and perhaps more famil-
iar perspective.
Multimodality also gained in importance at the time when composition peda-
gogy was reconsidering the value of the languages the students were bringing into
the classroom. Multimodal projects, such as digital storytelling, allow their crea-
tors to remix or “codemesh” (Canagarajah, 2011) their own language and voice
with their choice of images and music to create a form that exemplifies the goals of
multilingualism but academic writing as well. While initially concepts such as
“plurilingualism” and “multilingualism” referred to the students home and
learned languages, these concepts could also include their digital literacies (e.g.
Kress, 2003), as students “shuttled” from one form of literacy to another both
inside and outside the classroom.
The most recent stage in the development of the relationship between tech-
nology and the teaching of writing has been in the development of new spaces
for teaching and learning, best exemplified by the proliferation of Massive
Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and hybrid courses such as the flipped class-
room. MOOCs (Siemens, 2004), which vary greatly in their design, attempted
to take advantage of various features of the Internet, most consistently its dis-
tributed nature. MOOCs could be designed with a top-down structure, often
referred to as xMOOCs (Kohler, 2012) with traditional lectures supplemented
by massive discussion boards, or from the bottom up (cMOOCs) where it is
expected that knowledge will emerge from the network, often in a more chaotic
fashion.
These MOOCs, which again were not designed with composition teaching in
mind, often attracted tens of thousands of participants, whose sheer number raised
the possibility of their use for teaching composition. In 2013, four US universities
released composition MOOCs and while none of them were designed for L2 learn-
ers, their global nature ensured that large numbers of their participants would be
L2 writers. Since then, there have been various manifestations of MOOCs designed
specifically for L2 learners.
The importance of MOOCs raised questions about whether composition could
be taught within a network that lacked a central “expert” teacher but where learn-
ing emerged from the discussions within the network. The large number of partici-
pants, for example, made it impossible for traditional teacher feedback, so most of
the commenting had to come from peer reviewing. Unlike in the traditional class-
room, the number of participants also allowed for as many peer reviews as needed
as well the opportunity to ask for more reviews if desired. Supplemental technolo-
gies needed to be developed to facilitate both the exchange of papers and the train-
ing of peer reviewers. MOOCs also forced teachers to rethink the design of the

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 6 Technology for Teaching English as a Second Language (ESL) Writing

writing course. The large dropout rate, often around 95%, indicated that learners
were making more of their own decisions about what and how much they wanted
to learn. The greater autonomy given to the learner meant that teachers had to
consider how to better modularize their lessons so that students could take what
they felt they needed and leave the rest.
Hybrid or flipped classrooms, on the other hand, are more similar to the tradi-
tional classroom structure. Both, with certain technological enhancements, can
incorporate traditional classroom approaches which can be distributed into
­different learning spaces. They were not designed for composition teaching but
could be used to explore new aspects of technologically enhanced teaching and
learning. Modeled after the popular Khan Academy, lectures could be recorded and
posted on YouTube or other spaces outside the classroom so that the students could
view them whenever, wherever, and how often they wished. The classroom time
could be designed more as a studio where the students could ask questions and
receive feedback at the moment they were working on that particular problem. As
with the MOOCs, a greater autonomy is given to the students, who can use that
autonomy or not as they see fit.
MOOCs and hybrid classrooms have developed in response to a concern that
classrooms and institutions are not designed to accommodate the changes in the
students and the technologies they are using, a situation sometimes described as
the failure of the 19th century classroom to meet the needs of 21st century learning.
This newest stage of evolution has, as with every other stage, brought a certain
degree of anxiety to the teacher as well as an excitement over its potential.
From the first introduction of technology into the language-learning classroom,
teachers have expressed concern over how these technologies will affect not only
their relationships with their students but their profession as well. MOOCs in
particular have heightened that concern in that they can both dramatically change
teacher–student relationships and threaten teacher jobs, a particular worry at a
time of rising costs and economic uncertainty. New technologies for machine
grading or automatic feedback can affect fundamental teacher–student relation-
ships. Even checking for copied texts can be outsourced to a computer.
Teachers have other reasons to be concerned as well. Decisions about the use
of technology often come down from administrators and may not represent the
best practices for using technology. Such decisions can affect not only how the
technologies are implemented but also which technologies are to be used. Many
of these new approaches to teaching and learning require the purchase of hard-
ware, particularly tablets and smartphones. Mobility has been a goal of design-
ers of personal computers since their inception, but the newest versions still
require a sometimes continuous outflow of money. Moreover, while there are a
great many free and inexpensive technologies teachers can use, the implementa-
tion of technologically enhanced classrooms can be costly, meaning that teachers
can sometimes again be in the unusual situation of being dependent on outside
funding sources to implement their plans. Many of these technologies have been
pitched as a panacea to the problems teachers often face but with little evidence
that they can in reality solve the problems they promise to address.

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 Technology for Teaching English as a Second Language (ESL) Writing 7

The conservative nature of technological evolution can itself be frustrating to

teachers. This evolution has tended to be additive; most of the technologies used
in the past, such as word processing programs and spell-checkers, are still used.
Early technologies tended to be tools used to support existing pedagogies. Newer
technologies have created a myriad of writing spaces, each supporting a different
form of literacy. The new teaching and learning spaces have sometimes forced
teachers to rethink their traditional approaches to teaching and learning. As a
result, teachers are often faced with choosing the most appropriate technology to
use to respond to their pedagogical goals. Thus, teaching with technology requires
a great amount of careful planning and evaluation, as well as sometimes simple
luck that the technologies chosen will still be there when needed.

SEE ALSO: CALL (Computer-Assisted Language Learning) Research; Digital

Storytelling; Multilingualism as a Writing Resource; Situated Learning in CALL
Teacher Education; Technology and Pedagogical Goals; Technology Enhanced
Learning Environments; Technology for Teaching English as a Foreign Language
(EFL) Writing; Textual Borrowing and Intellectual Property; Visual Design and
Multimodal Composing; Weblogs

References

Bergmann, J., & Sams, A. (2012). Flip your classroom: Reach every student in every class every
day. Eugene, OR: International Society for Technology in Education.
Berners-Lee, T. (1999). Weaving the Web: The original design and ultimate destiny of the World
Wide Web. New York, NY: Harper Collins.
Canagarajah, A. S. (2011). Codemeshing in academic writing: Identifying teachable
strategies of translanguaging. The Modern Language Journal, 95, 401–17.
Carr, N. (2011). The shadows: What the internet is doing to our brains. New York, NY: W.W.
Norton.
Haas, C. (1996). Writing technology: Studies on the materiality of literacy. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence
Erlbaum.
Krause, S. D., & Lowe, C. (Eds.). (2014). Invasion of the MOOCs: The promise and perils of
Massive Online Courses. Andersonville, SC: Parlor Press. Retrieved from http://www.
parlorpress.com/pdf/invasion_of_the_moocs.pdf
Kress, G. (2003). Literacy in the new media age. London, England: Routledge.
New London Group. 1996. A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. Harvard
Educational Review. Retrieved from http://newarcproject.pbworks.com/f/Pedagogy%
2Bof%2BMultiliteracies_New%2BLondon%2BGroup.pdf
Kohler, D. (2012). What we’re learning from online education. Retrieved from http://www.ted.
com/talks/daphne_koller_what_we_re_learning_from_online_education
O’Reilly, T. (2005, September 30). What is Web 2.0? Design patterns and business models for the
next generation of software. Retrieved from http://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/web2/
archive/what-is-web-20.html
Siemens, G. (2004). Connectivism: A learning theory for the digital age. Elearnspace.
Retrieved from http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/connectivism.htm

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 8 Technology for Teaching English as a Second Language (ESL) Writing

Suggested Readings

Bloch, J. (2004). Second language cyber rhetoric: A study of Chinese L2 writers in an online
Usenet group, Language, Learning, and Technology, 8, 66–82.
Bloch, J. (2007) Technology in the L2 composition classroom. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press.

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