The Effects Of Automated Writing Scoring On College Students’ English Writing Proficiency

In1970s, feedback was put forward as an important notion in foreign/second language writing with the emergence of process approach. Along with the development of information technology and the deeper recognition of foreign language teaching evaluation, the forms of feedback have changed from the summative assessment of product approach to the formative assessment of process approach based on communication theory. The development of computer technology provides with new form of feedback which is Automated Essay Scoring (AES). As an assessment tool and a score tool, AES has been extensively applied to language teaching and large-scale tests in some western countries especially in the United States while the researches on AES are still on the preliminary stage in China. Therefore, the exploration of applicability to the English teaching and the real application of AES to English writing teaching are tasks of top priority in China.This experimental study theoretically based on the theory of formative assessment, the theory of social culture and Computer-assisted language learning lasted for one academic year in which AES was applied to English writing teaching as a tool of assessment. This study attempts to solve the following problems.1) How does AES affect the students’writing quality?2) How does AES affect the students’syntactic ability?The object of this study, eighty students from different majors in a comprehensive university, is divided equally into experimental group and control group. In the pretest, the two groups’scores given by the AES Writing Roadmap2.0show no significant difference. In the experiment, the two groups share one English teacher and the same topics for writing practice; however, the forms of their feedback are different. The experimental group’s feedback is given by the AES Writing Roadmap2.0while the control group’s is given by their teacher. Similar to the pretest, the posttest was also conducted in the AES Writing Roadmap2.0. The data collected after the posttest is analyzed through descriptive statistics as well as inference statistics which include paired-samples t-test and independent samples t-test. And the research tool is statistical software package for the social science SPSS20.0which is used extensively in foreign language teaching research.The data analysis shows the results as following. First, for scores, the result of independent samples t-test demonstrates that the scores of the compositions of the posttest have significant difference (p>0.05). Second, for syntactic ablity, the result of independent samples t-test also demonstrates that experimental group and control group have significant difference in syntactic fluency, syntactic accuracy and other syntactic complexity indices except complexity ratios. Third, for the scores, the result of paired-samples t-test demonstrates holistic score and scores of different dimensions of these two groups’compositions in posttest are both raised and the scores of experimental group are raised higher than that of control group. For syntactic ability, the result of paired-samples t-test demonstrates that experimental group’s every indices of posttest and pretest are significantly different while the control group’s indices show no obvious difference except syntactic fluency.Research results show that the AES Writing Roadmap2.0applied to English writing has remarkable influence on college students’scores of writing and their syntactic ability, which is quantified as syntactic complexity, syntactic accuracy and syntactic fluency. As a result, the college students’writing proficiency is improved. The conclusions of this study are stated as follows. Under the guidance of teachers, formative assessment tool AES play a significant role in English writing teaching.