Analyzing how the sobek tool can assist students’ writing

Abstract

Reading and text production are two important skills for everyone, but it is known that even students in higher education have difficulties how to write high-quality texts. Currently, there are several automatic text analysis tools, also well-known as text mining tools, available on the Internet (paid and free) which can be used to support text production, such as LanguageTool (Zhang et al., 2018), TextAlyser (TextAlyser, 2019), TagCrowd (TagCrowd, 2019), and Sobek (Macedo et al., 2016). These tools usually highlight attention points in a text, present a statistical analysis, suggest connection words, and emphasize locals with repetitive words, turning out a text with higher quality. Thus, this paper presents a case study using the Sobek automatic text analysis tool to investigate its potential to support students in the learning process (reading and production/writing). One group of 26 students enrolled in 9th grade from a middle school in the Paraiba state, Brazil, participated in writing activities using the Sobek tool. From the experiments, the results have shown an upgrade in text writing skills, especially showing a vocabulary more diversified and text structures, which are discussed in this paper.