Digital Support for Teaching Punctuation in Academic Writing in English

Background. Academic writing skills are crucial to the enterprise of higher education, because much of the academic communication is in writing. As a rule, foreign language learners face different problems with vocabulary misuse, grammatical errors, spelling, capitalization, punctuation and some others when write academic texts in English. There are various technologies for solving these problems. One of them is digital support, because traditional types of academic writing instruction in the classroom are not always sufficient. Purpose. The present study researches the influence of digital support on students' knowledge and punctuation skills in academic writing in English. Methods. The paper summarizes the results of an empirical study: training punctuation in academic writing lessons for two groups of students. A total of 24 students aged 20 to 24 participated in the experiment. The control group was applied a face-to-face and a text-book based traditional methodology. The experimental group was trained not only with a basic textbook but also with digital support. The level of knowledge and abilities in punctuation were measured with three final tests. Results. The results obtained indicate that academic writing instructions in traditional textbooks are not enough to develop punctuation skills. In its turn, digital support in training punctuation has significant didactic potential: the experimental group has demonstrated higher results in the final tests than the control one. Thus, digital support should be one of the main parts of the academic writing training process and should be included in training programs. Implications. The materials of the present paper (resources on punctuation, evaluating tables, types of tasks and tests) can be used in a real teaching practice.