A Comparative Study Of The Effects Of Teacher Feedback And Automated Feedback On Non-english Majors’ Writing

Feedback, as a necessary part in the EFL teaching of writing, its effect on theEFL learners’ writing ability has always been a research focus in the area of secondlanguage acquisition. Effective feedback, through evaluating the overall writingquality and pointing out potential problems, informs the writers of the errors theycommit in their writing output, thus helping to improve their writing proficiency.Recently, along with the rapid development of science and technology, computer hasincreasingly been applied to the teaching of EFL writing, and computerized scoringsystem, based on corpus linguistics and cloud computing, has been favored by moreand more EFL teachers due to its convenience and high efficiency. So far, researchersboth at home and abroad have already carried out some researches on the automatedscoring system, however, most of these studies address the issues of reliability andvalidity in the language testing area, hence revealing a research gap in the area ofsecond language acquisition. There are still some questions unanswered, for example,whether the feedback provided by the automated scoring system helps to improve theEFL learners’ writing ability and whether the EFL learners identify with theautomated feedback, and so on.With all these questions, this study undertakes to compare the teacher feedbackand automated feedback, aiming to investigate the effect of the two types of feedbackin improving the EFL learners’ writing proficiency and to elicit the EFL learners’attitude towards the two types of feedback.Guided by the theories of Process Writing Approach, the Input Hypothesis, theOutput Hypothesis and the Interaction Hypothesis, the present research mainly adoptsquantitative method and examines the writing performance of60subjects through awhole term’s teaching experiment.The results of the study shows that: Firstly, students in both groups held a positive attitude to these two types of feedback, but comparatively speaking, studentsagree more with teacher feedback; Secondly, when it comes to the writing interest,teacher feedback can better motivate students in writing than automated feedback;Thirdly, there is a minor improvement with the writing proficiency of both groups, butthere is no significant difference between the improvements of the two groups.Based on the findings above, the author suggests that due importance should beattached to the teacher feedback and meanwhile the intelligence of automated scoringsystem need to be enhanced, and the combination of the two types of feedback wouldbe more desirable in the teaching of EFL writing in China’s context.