A Study On Feedback In College English Writing Based On Automated Scoring System

Alone with the rapid development of science and technology, computers have beenapplied to English writing teaching. Computer automated scoring system, based oneducational technology, automatically provides assessment and feedback to students’compositions. Such way of assessing compositions or essays has become the directionand trend of future feedback researches. Although researchers have done a large numberof researches on feedback in College English writing for non-English majors, few ofthem pay attention to the feedback provided by computer automated scoring system.Therefore, it is quite necessary to conduct a research on feedback in College Englishwriting based on automated scoring system by figuring out its influence on student’sEnglish writing, thus providing enlightenment and reference for the assessment ofCollege English writing.The thesis takes Juku, the automated scoring system used in Chongqing University,as an example to discuss automated feedback’s influence on students’ College Englishwriting in terms of answering four questions:(1) What are the impacts of Juku’sfeedback on students’ English writing?(2) What is students’ attitude towards Juku’sfeedback?(3) What is teachers’ attitude towards Juku’s feedback?(4) What shouldteachers do when Juku’s automated feedback cannot satisfy students’ requirements andneeds?In order to answer the four questions, this thesis examines the influence offeedback provided by Juku on students’ writing scores, times of submittingcompositions, language errors, quantity of compositions’ words, text structure, positivecomment by using the methods of comparative analyzing composition samples writtenon Juku. And then it turns to investigate students and teachers’ attitude toward theautomated scoring system through questionnaires and interview respectively.The main results of this study are as follows: Firstly, the feedback provided byJuku indeed has great positive effect on students’ English writing in terms of linguisticknowledge such as vocabulary, grammar, and etc. instead of on their writing scores,numbers of writing words or text structure. Secondly, basic linguistic knowledge, suchas the misuse of Chinglish, vocabulary, and etc., is still considered as the most difficultpart for students’ writing even though Juku’s feedback could help to reduce theirlinguistic errors to some extend. Thirdly, the more times students revise and resubmit their writing according to Juku’s feedback for, the higher scores they would get.Fourthly, teachers play a quite significant role in assessing and evaluating students’writing, and whose feedback cannot be totally replaced by that of automated scoringsystem. The last but not the least, both students and teachers approve the positive effectof Juku’s feedback on English writing overall, especially on the aspect of linguisticknowledge such as vocabulary, grammar and etc. Based on the results above andrelevant theoretical views, some suggestions about how to provide effective feedback toimprove students’ English writing are put forward at the end of the thesis.