"CATEAP: The Virtual Academic Writing Class"

This paper describes CATEAP software, which has been developed, and continues to be developed by Jon Mills at the University of Luton. CATEAP provides all the materials for the writing component of the Academic English and Study Skills module for first year undergraduate students whose first language is not English. CATEAP aims to explain and provide practice in a number of language functions that are employed in academic discourse and provides approximately 40 hours of writing activities. CATEAP is for classroom use with a teacher present and lock-step is necessary at various points during each lesson. Each lesson incorporates a variety of tasks and task types including pages of exposition, drills, short essay writing, peer critiquing and use of a concordancer. Peer critiquing of essays takes place over the intra-net with the students adopting pseudonyms. Students report that they like the anonymity that this virtual classroom provides. The role of the teacher is concerned with managing the virtual classroom, allowing students to sometimes work at their own pace and at other times focussing the entire class in lock-step.