I have a spelling checker,
It came with my PC.
It plane lee marks four my revue
Miss steaks aye can knot sea.
Do grammar and spell check actually help students learn? While it is Montessori-like in principle, making writing more like a self-correcting work, it removes much of the burden of correcting mistakes from the student because they are not forced to identify errors as the software makes suggestions for them.
In addition, grammar and spell checkers in particular, are not especially sensitive to context. The “Spellchecker Poem” (Zar, 1994; Hensel, 2008) passes through a spell checker without comment despite the obvious errors. While grammar checkers are getting better, accurately assessing context is a difficult challenge and fail when a person is trying to intentionally break the rules of grammar, which distracts the writer from their true intentions. Auto-correct functions can also be an incredible pain.
Spell and grammar check functions might work better if they just identified errors but not give students suggestions for corrections.
Of course, in writing this I am using spell check for almost every other word. They are an essential part of electronic writing and inseparable from computer use today. They are ubiquitous in academia and the workplace. Indeed it can be argued that their proper usage is a necessary skill to learn, although to most effectively use checkers you may very well need to know the rules of grammar that the checkers prevent students from learning.
I need to do a bit more research on the subject since I’m pretty sure I’m not the first to address this dilemma. I would really appreciate any suggestions about where to find publications about the topic (my Google-fu is weak with respect to this topic for some reason).
It would also probably be useful to create a lesson specifically dealing with the use of grammar and spell checking, probably using the “Spellchecker Poem“. My students do most of their writing electronically, either on the wiki or using word processing software so this is a topic I need to clarify my own thoughts on soon.