A Study Of The Effectiveness Of Online Writing

As the English teaching reform progressing in China’s higher education, the computer-and internet-based teaching modes have been applied increasingly widely in ESL (English as a Second Language) education, among which, the online writing plays a progressively important role. Bingo English automated essay assessing system, one of the many online writing and assessing systems in use across China, has been widely used in China’s higher schools for writing practices and assessment. However, there have been very few researches on the effectiveness of such kinds of systems in terms of their function of improving students’writing instead of its assessing function. Therefore, this paper attempts to study the automated writing rating system and the effectiveness of its writing function in prompting students to improve their writing, so as to provide useful information for writing instruction and the development of the systems.This research was conducted on 60 first-year students majoring in pharmacology of Renji School of Wenzhou Medical College by comparing their corrective rate of errors in online writing mode and traditional paper-based writing (TPbW) mode. Having acquired the corrective rate of errors and number of new errors under the two different writing modes, R2.10.1 was applied to test the normality of the corrective rate and number of new errors. Wilcoxon paired test was employed to compare the distribution difference between the writing assessment indicators. When a=0.05, the results suggest:1) the corrective rate of local errors of TPbW is higher than that of online writing; 2) the corrective rate of global errors of TPbW is higher than that of online writing; 3) the overall corrective rate of errors of TPbW is higher than that of online writing.The findings have important implications for online writing instruction and the development of online writing system. One of the implications of great significance is that, in order to fully utilize the online writing and rating system to fundamentally improve students’writing ability, the location of errors for the students should be optimized. Besides, the involvement of teachers and their instruction in the online writing process is indispensable.