Enhancing EFL writing courses with the online student response system socrative

Developments in digital technology have provided language educators with countless tools they can use to enhance their courses. With this goal in mind, two digital tools were integrated into two semester-long English as a Foreign Language writing courses at a Japanese university. The first tool, a blog, was used for peer feedback, and the second, an online student response system (OSRS), was used to check students' understanding (comprehension checks) and help them plan writing tasks (brainstorming). Questionnaire data were collected from 50 students and the findings were presented at the Fourth Annual Asian Conference on Technology in the Classroom. Detailed information about the blog-based part of this research project was published in the conference proceedings (Ohashi, 2014). This article focuses on the OSRS, Socrative, which was seen by most students as beneficial to their learning and offered the teacher some clear advantages in terms of class management.