L2 Learners’ Engagement With Automated Writing Evaluation Feedback From A Sociocultural Perspective

Automated writing evaluation(AWE)feedback has grabbed increasing attention in writing research in the past 20 years.Most studies have been conducted on the quality of AWE feedback,AWE feedback’s influence on L2 writing,students’ attitude towards AWE feedback and the use of AWE feedback in L2 teaching.Nevertheless,student engagement with AWE feedback has received little attention in L2 writing.This study aims to investigate students’ uptake of AWE feedback,their engagement with AWE feedback to make revisions in L2 writing and factors influencing student engagement with AWE feedback,through textual analysis,interviews and classroom observation.This multiple case study examines student engagement with AWE feedback through analysis of 176 texts of twenty-two second-year English major students in a comprehensive university in China.Afterwards,six students were interviewed to explore the factors influencing students’ uptake of AWE feedback and engagement with AWE feedback.Research results demonstrate that students adopt most of AWE feedback.They are more inclined to adopt the feedback on technical errors,but seldom adopt the feedback on syntactic errors related to the composition and structure of sentences.Additionally,student engagement with AWE feedback is an immensely complex process whereby students’ behavioral involvement,affective reaction and cognitive efforts jointly function and yield effective revisions.Furthermore,sociocultural factors affecting student engagement with AWE feedback include students’ need for improving L2 writing proficiency,their learning attitudes and learning habits(subject),use of online searching tools(mediating artifact),revision purposes,insight into AWE systems and writing assignments(object),teachers’ requirements and learning outcome evaluative mechanism(rule),teachers’ instruction and peers’ assistance(community),and students’ dual identities as learners and judges(division of labor).The research results provide implications for AWE systems that AWE systems need to be constantly improved and offer more specific suggestions of improving the essay structure and content,prompting more advanced vocabulary and idiomatic expressions,and helping each student establish incorrect sentence sets.Moreover,L2 writing teachers could offer explicit instruction on effective use of revision strategies,particularly to less proficient students,and ultimately motivate them to engage with AWE feedback.Teachers are also advised to jointly employ peer feedback,teacher writing proficiency.