A Study Of AES-based English Writing Self-efficacy Of College Students

Cultivation and development of English writing proficiency is a key and difficult point in English teaching.Since Bandura(1977)firstly proposed the theory of selfefficacy in 1977,more and more scholars in China and abroad started to look into English writing self-efficacy.Then with the advance of science and technology,the Automated Essay Scoring(AES)was born based on cloud computing and big data.Related studies on reliability,validity and application of AES emerged continually.The present study chooses 120 non-English majors from freshmen and sophomores in Tiangong University(TGU)as research subjects,combined with the use of Juku AES and then studied students' English writing self-efficacy: the state quo,the differences between two grades and different gender,as well as the differences among students with different frequencies of essay modification and different perceptions on using Juku AES.The researcher employed questionnaires and interviews as instruments to collect data,and SPSS 25 was used as an analytical tool to process these data.The research findings are showed as follow:(1)Students held relatively positive perceptions and attitude towards using Juku AES.(2)When students used the Juku AES,their English writing self-efficacy were at the medium level.And their writing skill self-efficacy was stronger than writing task self-efficacy.(3)There was not significant difference of writing self-efficacy between freshmen and sophomores.Similarly,there was not significant gender difference in writing self-efficacy.(4)There were significant differences of writing self-efficacy among students with different frequencies essay modification and different perceptions on using Juku AES.According to the above findings,some pedagogical suggestions were put forward for English writing teaching and limitations of this research were pointed out at last.