ABSTRACT
As Tschichold et al. (1994) pointed out, most English grammar checkers are designed for native speakers of English and have questionable value for nonnative speakers. This is still true of most commercially available grammar checkers except one — Inso Corporation’s NativeEnglish™ Writing Assistant. Recognizing that the needs of ESL learners have largely been unmet by traditional proofing tools, Inso Corporation has developed an English writing and reading tool that is specifically designed for non-native speakers of English. This product combines the computational linguistic technology employed in CorrectText® Grammar Correction System and CorrectEnglish™ Proofing System (Hu 1996) with ESL corpus research. Therefore, NativeEnglish detects and offers corrections for many non-native speaker errors in addition to the common native speaker errors. It also includes English and bilingual dictionaries for on-line reference. In this paper, we will focus on the methodology in the analysis of our ESL corpus, which is used to build the rules that distinguishes NativeEnglish Writing Assistant from other commercially available English grammar checkers. We will then describe the computational linguistic technology that underlies the product. Finally, we will discuss major features of NativeEnglish and ways to incorporate it in CALL programs, primarily for English reading and writing.
