Interesting and useful things made using Anthropic’s Claude.

Eiken Writing Practice Tool (CEFR B1)

Description: The primary purpose of this tool is to offer students a more intensive way to exercise their writing skills without increasing teacher burden. The tool currently offers sample essays, Japanese translations, as well as a detailed evaluation of their essay. The tool does not use LLM models to evaluate essays, instead relying on algorithmic heuristics to measure essay length, lexical and sentence complexity as well as coherence and flow (transition words, complete thoughts/sentences, hedging) and penalizes redundancy.

The tool differs from using an AI chatbot for writing, in that it has been designed with specific constructs in mind. Particularly to offer a structured evaluation using the CEFR Framework as guard rails to optimize learning, rather than a free flowing conversation with an LLM using ambiguous parameters. Evaluation is visualized as a matrix rubric which students can immediately comprehend and understand the linguistic areas that they are strongest/weakest in.

Additionally, since there are no open calls to LLMs, all processing happens locally on the student’s browser, keeping data secure. Overall, the Eiken Writing Practice tool fulfills an immediate need that addresses several issues related to EFL writing practice for most students. The questions database is usually updated once a month.