Bon Patron (BP) is an online grammar and spelling checker for second language (L2) learners of French developed by Terry Nadasdi (University of Alberta) and Stéfan Sinclair (McMaster University) (URL: http://bonpatron.com). BP is free to access, although web advertisements appear above and to the right of the text-editing interface. A ‘Pro’ version (URL: http://pro.bonpatron.com) is also available to individual subscribers for a fee of 9.99 €. BP Pro (used for this review) is free of web advertisements, and it provides a slightly more user-friendly web interface than does the free version. In addition, BP Pro archives submitted texts, which can then be accessed by subscribers at a later time.
The BP interface is available in both English and French (see the following YouTube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiTckrlL9Ho). Users can choose their language of preference at the bottom right of the screen. BP also allows users to indicate if first-person singular references should be feminine (the default is masculine) by clicking ‘‘je’ is feminine’, which is not always a possibility in web-based grammar, spelling and translation tools (Williams, Reference Williams2006). Native speakers of French who wish to check their grammar and spelling can check the ‘I’m Francophone’ box, which will turn off certain expression checkers that catch common anglicisms, false cognates, and so forth.
Users enter their text in the text editor provided on the BP website (it functions like an HTML text editor in web-based email), either by writing directly into the text editor or by copying and pasting from Word or any other word processor or text source. If accents and diacritics are missing from the text, users can insert them by simply clicking on the appropriate accented letter just above the text editor. Accented letters are available in both capital and lower case forms. Once the text is entered, users click the ‘Check Text’ button to initiate the grammar and spell checker.
BP uses a colour-coded system to indicate whether a word (or group of words) should be modified (red) or simply checked for accuracy (yellow). (Red text indicates that there is definitely an error whereas yellow text appears to indicate a potential error.) Grammar mistakes are highlighted with either red or yellow boxes and spelling errors are indicated by red or yellow italicized text. A pop-up box provides feedback when the user hovers the cursor over an error. Feedback on grammatical errors is predominately metalinguistic (see (1)). Vocabulary suggestions are given for spelling errors (see (2)). A particularly nice feature of BP Pro that is not available in the free version is that a summary of errors and relevant feedback is provided at the bottom of the page.
(1) Text entered: je aime le français. [“je aime” was highlighted with a red box] Feedback: You need to elide the two vowels, e.g.: l’eau, l ’homme, qu’elle.
(2) Text entered: il y a beacoup de pommes [“beacoup” appeared in red italic font] Feedback: Spelling error -suggestions: beaucoup, à-coup, bacul, d’à-coup, l’à-coup, à-coups, d’à-coups
The strengths and weaknesses of BP have been well documented elsewhere (Burston, Reference Burston2008; Nadasdi & Sinclair, Reference Nadasdi and Sinclair2007). Overall, BP is relatively effective in identifying low-level morphosyntactic errors (e.g. adjective agreement, verb endings and preposition use) and spelling mistakes. However, it identifies discourse-level and semantic problems far less frequently. As such, users should not expect BP to help them fix the ‘text’ (e.g. discourse coherence, relationships between clauses and/or sentences, intended meaning) so much as they should use it to correct or revise an already developed text. Of course, much depends on the learner's level of proficiency. More advanced learners will undoubtedly find BP more useful for checking their texts for common grammar and spelling errors before submitting final versions to their instructors than will learners at lower levels of proficiency.
Although the editing function of BP may be beneficial to learners who want help correcting errors before turning in a written assignment, I do have some concerns about its pedagogical application, especially in lower-level (e.g. beginning-and intermediate-level) courses. The type of metalinguistic feedback provided by BP, notably for morphosyntactic errors, simultaneously risks underassisting and overassisting learners (see Aljaafreh & Lantolf, Reference Aljaafreh and Lantolf1994). This is because the feedback provided by BP is not delivered on the basis of individual learner needs, nor is it graduated (i.e. moving from implicit to explicit assistance). As a result, whereas some learners may benefit from this feedback, it can also be too vague to be helpful for others (i.e., underassistance). At the same time, other learners may need little more than to have their attention drawn to a particular word or group of words (e.g., highlighted text), in which case the feedback may be detrimental to their agency (i.e., overassistance). It appears that the developers of BP have attempted to strike a middle ground between very implicit and very explicit assistance, which, in my view, has severely limited the potential of BP in helping learners to develop their writing abilities, even if the end product is more formally accurate than the original text.
Despite this critique, I do believe that BP can be successfully incorporated into L2 instruction, provided that it is not used to replace the teacher. Instead, language teachers who choose to use BP (or any other tool that might be available) in the classroom should keep in mind that it is not the technology itself that makes for successful language learning so much as the particular uses of technology. As such, if used to complement teacher-student or student-student collaborative work in the classroom, BP is a potentially useful tool. In addition, using BP does not have to be limited to the culmination of a writing task (i.e. the editing function). Instead, teachers may want to use BP's error summaries and feedback as a point of departure for other in-class language learning opportunities.
