| As one of the four elements of English learning,writing has always been the focus and difficulty of English teaching.As an important evaluation means of English writing,feedback has a deep impact on students’ English writing ability.However,in College English writing teaching,the current situation of teacher feedback is not optimistic.Due to limited time and energy,it is difficult to meet the feedback needs of students.Therefore,it is vital to find a timely and effective way of feedback.In recent years,with the rapid development of science and technology,a batch of automated writing evaluation systems(AWES)based on corpus and cloud computing have emerged,which are favored by English teachers and researchers.However,there is no substantial evidence for the effectiveness of AWES feedback.Whether AWES feedback is better than teacher feedback needs further exploration.Therefore,it is of great significance to compare the effect of AWES feedback with that of teacher feedback on College students’ English writing.1.Based on process writing theory,formative evaluation theory and interactive hypothesis theory as well as relying on Pigai platform,this study conducts a 16-week English writing feedback experiment among non-English major sophomores in two classes of Xinjiang Normal University.One of the two classes is chosen as the experimental group(EG)adopting the AWES feedback,while the other is regarded as the control group(CG)applying traditional teacher feedback,aiming to explore the following three questions: 1)What are the effects of teacher feedback and AWES feedback on students’ English writings scores? 2)What are the effects of teacher feedback and AWES feedback on different-level students’ writing scores? 3)What are students’ respective attitudes towards AWES feedback and teacher feedback?The results show that: 1)significant improvement is found in students’ writing scores in both EG and CG after receiving teacher feedback and AWES feedback respectively,which indicates that both the two different types of feedback can improve students’ writing scores.However,the improvement of writing scores in EG is higher than that in CG,which shows that AWES feedback is more effective in improving students’ writing scores,specifically in terms of vocabulary,grammar and mechanics;while students in CG make some progress in organization and content,which reveals that teacher feedback has a significant effect on organization and content of students’ articles.2)AWES feedback is more beneficial for medium-level and low-level students,while for those in high level,they benefit more from teacher feedback.3)Results from questionnaire and interview indicate that although most students hold a positive attitude towards the two types of feedback,they also point out that any single type of feedback cannot meet their writing needs,hoping to combine them together.AWES does well in vocabulary and grammar,since it can provide a large amount of extended knowledge.Its function of timely feedback is more helpful to cultivate students’ writing interest and relieve their writing pressure,while teacher feedback has higher accuracy,and it has more advantages in terms of content and organization.Besides,more targeted opinions can be provided in terms of content and organization of an article.Therefore,based on the above research results,it is suggested that teachers should try to apply AWES feedback into writing teaching and make full use of the advantages of AWES feedback and teacher feedback,so as to maximize the feedback efficiency and improve the students’ overall writing proficiency. |
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