The Effect Of Automatic Writing Evaluation System’s Feedback On The Teaching Of College English Writing

With the development of science and technology,the theoretical research and application of computer-assisted language teaching have increased much quickly,especially in the field of college English writing teaching.Automatic writing evaluation systems based on computer-assisted writing teaching can not only provide immediate feedback and scores for students’ writings,but also reduce the burden of teachers in grading papers,providing a new teaching mode and feedback method for the teaching of college English writing.Foreign research on the development and application of automatic writing evaluation systems has been widely performed,while domestic development and research on automatic writing evaluation systems start late and the related research is not much.Most of the relevant domestic research focuses on Pigai System and Bingo English,but less on iWrite.Through the research,scholars find that the scores provided by Pigai System are significantly higher than the scores of human evaluation,and Bingo English could not point out the writing errors,while the developers of English writing teaching and evaluation system(iWrite)believe that iWrite not only has high scoring reliability and convenient operation but also can provide comprehensive feedback,which can improve the students’ ability to learn independently.However,there are few empirical studies to verify the practical application effect of iWrite.Because of this,this thesis mainly explores the role of iWrite in assisting college English writing teaching from the following two aspects:(1)What are the effects of iWrite on college students’ writing ability?(2)How do students’ accept and like the feedback provided by iWrite?In this thesis,231 college freshmen from four universities who are not English majors are selected as the experimental subjects.Students are divided into the control group and the experimental group according to the two teaching methods of traditional college English writing teaching and i Wrirte-assisted college English writing teaching.Questionnaire survey,pre-test,post-test and three composition exercises are conducted on them.The research methods adopted in this thesis are sample analysis and questionnaire survey.Firstly,the reliability of iWrite is verified by comparing the scores provided by teachers and iWrite,and the feedback provided by iWrite is also explored.Then,by analyzing students’ scores of the pre-test and post-test writings,this thesis explores the influence of iWrite on college students’ English writing scores.Finally,in order to explore the specific changes of students’ writing ability,this paper explores the influence of iWrite on students’ writing fluency,accuracy and complexity by analyzing the writings.The analysis of writing features is mainly done by computer software L2 SCA,online analysis software Vocab Profile and Grammarly.The questionnaire is designed to explore college students’ acceptance and affection of the feedback provided by iWrite on all aspects of writing and statistical analysis of the data is done with SPSS 20.0.The results show:(1)The writing scores of the experimental group and the control group have both improved after one year of writing training,but the writing scores of the experimental group improve more significantly.By measuring the parameters of writing fluency,accuracy and complexity of the writings,this thesis finds that,the writing fluency,accuracy and complexity of the experimental group and control group have both been improved.But for the experimental group students,there has been a significant improvement in fluency(clause C),because iWrite can provide students with more opportunities to practice writing according to the immediate feedback.However,in terms of syntactic complexity,both the experimental group and the control group show a decrease.According to the study by Skehan & Foster(2001),it is because that the students pay more attention to writing accuracy and fluency in the limited time and ignore syntactic complexity.(2)According to the questionnaire survey,among teachers’ feedback,iWrite feedback and peer feedback,students are more like to accept teachers’ feedback,followed by iWrite feedback,while peer feedback is the least acceptable and effective.Judging from the effectiveness of the three feedback methods in language expression,text structure,content logic and spelling & punctuation,in the aspect of punctuation & spelling,more than half of the students believe iWrite feedback is the most effective,followed by teachers’ feedback and the least effective is peer feedback.But most students believe that the most effective feedback method in language expression,text structure and content logic is teachers’ feedback,followed by iWrite feedback and the least effective is peer feedback.Therefore,through the research,it can be found that iWrite can effectively improve college English students’ writing scores.However,college students still need teachers’ further guidance on language expression,text structure and content logic.In other words,iWrite can effectively assist teachers in college English writing teaching,but it cannot completely replace the role of teachers in college English writing teaching.Therefore,teachers are suggested to increase the use of iWrite in the teaching of college English writing,which can provide immediate feedback and grading for students’ writing practice,and assist teachers to solve students’ problems in writing more specifically in the limited class hours.