The Effect Of Automatic Essay Scoring Feedback On Lexical Richness And Syntactic Complexity In College English Writing

In order to explore the effect of AES(Automatic essay scoring) feedback on the lexical competence and syntactic competence in college English writing, the experimental research was conducted for 12 weeks with process writing approach, Swain’s output hypothesis approach and noticing approach as the theoretical basis. The online automatic essay scoring system “pigai.org” was chosen as the writing and feedback tool. The research subjects are sophomores from non-English majors of North University of China. The research questions are:(1) What is the effect of AES feedback on lexical richness in college English writing in terms of lexical variation and lexical sophistication?(2) What is the effect of AES feedback on syntactic complexity in college English writing in terms of writing unit length, clausal density and sentence patterns ? The software RANGE was used to analyze lexical richness of students’ compositions from lexical variation and lexical sophistication. According to the definitions of polio(1997)on T-unit, clause and error-free T-unit, syntactic complexity was analyzed from writing unit length, clausal density and sentence patterns. Then, the collected data will be analyzed by SPSS17.0. The results are as follows:(1) As for lexical variation, after 12-week AES feedback on students’ writings, the mean value of two measures(WT/T and WT/√2W) in statistical analysis are improved, paired samples T-test result shows that lexical variation in students’ compositions are significant difference before and after accepting AES feedback. Therefore, AES feedback can help college students to use more different types of vocabularies in their essays.(2) Concerning lexical sophistication, through the processing and analysis of the software RANGE, BASEWORD 1(the most frequent 1000 word list) shows that the number of words in students compositions is on the decrease after accepting AES feedback; BASEWORD 2(the second most frequent1000 word list) shows that the number of words in students’ compositions is on the increase, as well as BASEWORD 3(academic words)and words not in the lists. After the paired sample T-text, the result reflects that AES feedback is helpful to improve the development of lexical sophistication of college students’ writings.(3) In terms of writing unit length, there are three measuring indexes(T-unit length,clause length and error-free T-unit length). The mean values of the three indexes are on the increase, but in paired sample T-test, there is a significant difference on T-unit length in the text before and after accepting AES feedback(p=0.003< 0.05). The result indicates that the effect of AES feedback on T- unitlength is evident in writing unit length.(4) In terms of clausal density, the mean values of the three indexes(C/T, DC/C and EFT/T) used in this study are on the rise. However, paired samples T-test shows that there is a significant difference on EFT/T in the students’ compositions before and after accepting AES feedback. Meanwhile, the index EFT/T was also used to measure syntactic accuracy. The effect of AES feedback on clausal density is week while the effect to syntactic accuracy is obvious.(5) The last one is about sentence patterns. About four main independent clauses(simple sentence, compound sentence,complex sentence and compound-complex sentence), the number of simple sentences used by students reduced from 48% to 43%, and the compound sentences increased from 9.6% to 11.5%, the complex sentences increased from 38% to 40% and compound-complex sentences rise from 4.6% to 6.5%. In the paired sample T-test, only the difference of simple sentence used in students’ writings is significant. That indicates that students use less simple sentences and begin to turn to more complex sentences. In regard to six dependent clauses(adverbial clause, object clause, attribute clause, subject clause, predicative clause and appositive clause) in students’ essays, subject clause and predicative clause increased significantly,which means that AES feedback can improve the usage of dependent clauses to some degree.In conclusion, AES feedback is helpful to improve lexical richness of college students’ English writing,but the effect on syntactic complexity is not obvious. Therefore, the teacher’s participation is still particularly important in the improvement of students’ syntactic competence.