College Students’ Perceptions Towards Automated Writing Evaluation And Teacher’s Feedback

As an important stage of process approach, different types of feedback mode have been applied widely in English writing teaching in recent years, and the study of feedback is favored by a great many researchers. The feedback modes touched upon by various research mainly focused on teacher’s feedback. As the English teaching reform progressing in China’s higher education, the computer and internet based teaching modes have been applied increasingly widely in ESL (English as a Second Language) education.This study aims to find out students’attitude towards teacher’s feedback and AWE, and students’ideal feedback. The40English majors who participate in this study, are sophomores from two parallel classes of Capital Normal University. The study adopts questionnaire survey and semi-structured interviews to compare students’attitudes towards this issue, and explore the reasons behind it.The major findings of this thesis are as follows:1. The students are supportive of both AWE and teacher’s feedback. But it must be noted that all the students prefer teacher’s feedback because teacher’s feedback is not only useful in the aspect of language form of writing but also effective in helping students with their shortcomings in content and discourse of writing. However, AWE focuses on the grammatical errors only.2. Both good writers and poor writers are willing to accept teacher’s feedback, but the reasons are different. Good writers explain that teacher’s feedback attaches more attention on discourse, content and organization, which is conducive to improving their writing ability. Poor writers explain that they can communicate with the teacher and express their ideas directly if the teacher misunderstands the meaning of their writings.3. The students express the opinion that teacher’s feedback is more authoritative than AWE, but the two kinds of feedback should be combined.Based on the findings above, the author proposes that we should attach more importance to the combination of teacher’s feedback and AWE, which provides meaningful guidance to writing for English major students.