@CUE

Speed Up Student Feedback with Text
Expansion Applications

David Campbell
Obihiro University of Agriculture and Veterinary Medicine
To provide written feedback to a large number of students is time consuming but animportant aspect of a language instructor’s job. In addition to the time required, forthose who use a computer to provide feedback, excessive typing may increase the risk of arepetitive stress injury (RSI). Using text expansion software saves time and keystrokes, andstill allows for customized comments to individual students. There are several text expansion
applications for the Apple and Windows platforms and browser extensions for Firefox andChrome available. There are numerous reviews of the different applications and extensions,but the reviews only examine general use cases and don’t target language instructors. This
paper will look at specific uses of text expansion applications, by focusing on TextExpander,a Mac application, to demonstrate how to reduce the amount of time and number of
keystrokes required to provide text feedback to students and in the process lessen the risk ofa repetitive stress injury.

Text Expansion: What Is It And How Does It Work?

Providing effective and meaningful feedback to students, an important part ofan instructor’s job (Hattie and Timperley, 2006), is a time-consuming process,and for those who use a computer to give textual feedback there is the risk ofa repetitive stress injury (RSI) such as carpal tunnel syndrome from excessive
typing and mousing (Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, 1998). There is a certain irony
because the promise of computers has always been that they will save us time andmake our lives easier. For that promise to come true, however, the user must oftenspend a lot time finding software applications or the computer settings to makethis convenience a reality. Text expansion software, when used appropriately, canhelp to reduce the time and keystrokes required to provide feedback to students.
73Campbell

Text expansion software allows the user to type a short phrase or abbreviationthat the software then expands into a full word, phrase, or paragraph. People may
be familiar with auto fill, a feature that has been available in web browsers formany years, which automatically fills in passwords, mailing addresses, or emailaddresses for online forms. A similar feature is predictive typing or auto completethat has made typing on smartphones and tablets much easier because it allows
the user to type in only a few letters and the software suggests words that the user
can select quickly. The Macintosh OS X operating system and iOS on iPhones
and iPads have a text replacement feature (Figure 1) that lets the user create anumber of text abbreviations in the system preferences under the Keyboard
settings that when typed will expand it into a sentence, phrase, or longer text.
These text replacement abbreviations work across Apple applications like Pages,Numbers, or Notes. Microsoft Office has a similar feature called AutoText whichallows the user to create preset expressions, but like the feature in OS X it only
works with Microsoft Office applications: Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. With
text expansion applications (Appendix), the user can create regularly used items
and a corresponding abbreviation that is typed to trigger the insertion of theitem into webpages, word processing documents, spreadsheets or email messages.

Figure 1. Text replacement feature found in Apple’s OS X and iOS operating systems.

74Text Expansion Applications, OnCUE Journal, 10(1), pages 73-79

Text Expansion Software For Busy Teachers

To demonstrate the utility of text expansion software I will focus on Smile
Software’s TextExpander, which can be used on a Mac, iPad, and iPhone. The
features of other text expansion applications are very similar.
Text expansion software is suitable for any type of text that you find yourself
using repeatedly. It can be especially useful when providing feedback to students
on their assignments because students often make similar mistakes that require
the same correction or feedback to be provided again and again. For example,
in TextExpander you can create a “snippet”, the content that you want to insert,
and a unique abbreviation that when typed replaces the abbreviation with thecontent in the snippet. For example, if you would like the student to replacenouns with pronouns in a paragraph you could use a snippet like this:Don’t repeat the same nouns over and over. Try to use pronouns. If you would liketo more information on how to use pronouns, go to this website (http://www. ……).
By typing a short abbreviation like “npr” this 27-word snippet can beinstantly inserted into a Microsoft Word document, a Web browser window of alearning management system like Moodle, or even an email to provide feedback
to students. It is also possible to include formatting, for example, bold, italics, orcolored text.
There are settings in TextExpander that control how the abbreviations areexpanded and what keys are used to trigger a snippet insertion. It is important
not to create an abbreviation that is part of a common word because you will
constantly be adding text when you don’t intend to. It is also a good idea to think
about the keys that you want use to trigger the insertion so that the abbreviations
can be typed with one hand. This is especially useful if you find yourself using
a mouse in your right hand and typing with your left. This point sometimes
conflicts with the need to keep the snippet to something that is easy to remember.
Table 1 shows some examples of possible snippets (ones that I use) andthe abbreviations that trigger them. The software comes with some default
abbreviations and snippets, but the user needs to create ones that will meet hisor her needs. There is a feature that can be turned on that suggests snippets andabbreviations when the software detects text that is commonly repeated.
75Campbell
Table 1
Communication between EMI and Language-teaching Faculty
Abbreviation

Snippetwd(Check the word order. Move the word to ^.)*

cg

(Check the grammar.)cs(Check singular or plural.)rdi

Carefully read the instructions to the assignment again. You were supposed towrite an email to complain to the company about a problem, not tell me about aproblem you had with a company.

chpn

If you see % add a pronoun. A pronoun is something like "he", "she", or "it".

It seems you have trouble using the simple past tense form. This website might
help you. <http://www.englishpage.com/verbpage/simplepast.html>*The snippets in parentheses are inserted directly after the word or phrase the student should
check. Those without parentheses are inserted later in the document.
spt

In cases where you want to provide feedback for presentations or email
messages to students that need to be slightly customized for each person,
TextExpander has the capability of creating a boilerplate snippet with fill-in
fields and pull-down menus. First, you need to create the fill-in snippet (Figure2) by typing in the standardized text and the parts that need to be customized
for each student. Once that has been created, Figure 3 shows what appears aftertyping the abbreviation “Pfb” (presentation feedback) where it is needed. In
the window that subsequently appears, make the necessary selections from thepull-down menus, type text in the boxes, decide if the student needs to haveadditional feedback text, and then click OK. TextExpander then inserts the text
shown in Figure 4 into the document or email message.
Text expansion software is also useful in creating tests and quizzes where thewording of the instructions for questions needs to be consistent. For example,
when creating a dictation exercise it is possible to create a snippet to insert thetext below whenever it is necessary to include instructions.
Listen to the conversation and fill in the blanks with the correct words. Be carefulwith your spelling.
Text expansion applications aren’t limited to only phrases, sentences
or paragraphs. They can also insert photos, computer code, or html. More76

Text Expansion Applications, OnCUE Journal, 10(1), pages 73-79

Figure 2. The snippet for a feedback form created with Smile’s TextExpander.

Figure 3. Personalized feedback form created using TextExpander. Teacher chooses from the menu
items and enters desired custom text as desired for each student.

Figure 4. The actual feedback which the student receives.

77Campbell

importantly, for people with limited Japanese writing skills, polite emails inJapanese (e.g., よろしくお願いします。申し訳ございません。or お世話になっております。)
are just one short abbreviation away. It is also very useful to complete school
forms that need to be filled out with similar information. Type the text once tocreate a snippet, give it an abbreviation, and that lengthy text can be insertedwith just a few strokes of the keyboard.

Conclusion

If you are looking for ways to easily and quickly provide textual feedback tostudents and reduce the risk of RSI, text expansion software is worth exploring.
It does take time to create the snippets that you need, and it can be difficult toremember the abbreviations when you get a large collection, but once you havecreated them, you can use them repeatedly. You will find that once you start using
abbreviations to automatically insert text, you will have a difficult time using acomputer that does not have text expansion software installed.

References

Hattie, J., & Timperley, H. (2007). The power of feedback. Review ofEducational Research, 77(1), 81-112.
Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. (Sept., 1998). Typing Injuries TIFAQ. Retrieved
from http://www.tifaq.org/articles/carpal_tunnel_syndrome-sep98-wellconnected.html

Author bio

David Campbell is an assistant professor in the Department of Human Sciences at
Obihiro University of Agriculture and Veterinary Medicine in Obihiro, Hokkaido,
Japan. His current research interests are Moodle (a learning management system)and the use of information and communications technology in tertiary education inJapan. campbell@obihiro.ac.jp
Received: December 3, 2016
Accepted: March 6, 201778

Text Expansion Applications, OnCUE Journal, 10(1), pages 73-79

Appendix
Mac & Windows• TextExpander (Mac) (https://goo.gl/aVjm6v)• Typinator (Mac) (http://goo.gl/4hHd3f )• Breezy (Windows) (http://goo.gl/Z8LYJ)• Phrase Express (Mac & Windows) (http://goo.gl/fQswZd)• FastFox (Mac & Windows) (http://goo.gl/1GQB0n)• Auto Text Expander (Mac & Windows) (http://goo.gl/NcUQwd)
Mobile• TextExpand (https://goo.gl/1iGEvb)• TextExpander (iPhone App Store)
Browser Extensions• Auto Text Expander for Chrome• Text Complete for Firefox
Reviews of Text Expansion Applications• “How to use TextExpansion” (http://goo.gl/B1VP)• “Text Expanders Shrink Your Typing” (http://goo.gl/nqgQd7)• “7 Awesome Uses For PhraseExpress” (http://goo.gl/a6HgxK)79