| As the core of the process-oriented approach, feedback has gradually become more andmore popular in the field of foreign language teaching. With improvements in science, automatedessay scoring as a new type of feedback has become a hot topic at home and abroad. However,compared with overseas, the empirical study of automated essay scoring system is rare in China.Moreover, the participants of the existing researches are mainly college students, and few studieshave ever been conducted among vocational students. Many studies at home are based on foreignautomated essay scoring system which have problems in reliability and validity. And then, only anumber of studies have been carried out to compare the automated essay scoring feedback withother source of feedback. Therefore, in order to fill in the research gap, this study aims to explorethe effectiveness and students’ perception of automated essay scoring compared with teacherfeedback. The research questions are as follows:1) What are the respective focus of teacherfeedback and automated essay scoring on the correction of students’ writing?2) Which feedbackwill boost vocational students’ English writing proficiency, teacher feedback or automated essayscoring and are there any differences about the effects on different aspects of language skills(such as chapter structure, language expression and so on) produced by these two kinds offeedback?3) What is the students’ attitude toward teacher feedback and automated essay scoringin vocational college?In order to answer the three research questions, the author selected80sophomores from twoparallel classes of Shandong Xiehe University in Jinan, one as the control class, and the other asthe experimental class. The experiment lasts for16weeks, each student finish4pieces of writingduring the16-week English writing teaching. The writing of experimental class were assessed byJukuu, while the writing of the control class were corrected by teachers. In addition, afterstudents finished the post-test，two questionnaires were carried out in two classes to find out theiroverall perceptions towards teacher feedback and automated essay scoring. All the needed datafrom two English tests (pre-test and post-test), the writing tasks and questionnaires afterexperiment were carefully collected and analyzed by SPSS19.0quantitatively.The results of the writing tasks indicated that automated essay scoring pay more attention to language expression, grammar, spelling and punctuation errors, on the contrary, teacherfeedback laid more stress on discourse structure and content. The result of pre-test andpost-test pointed out:1) both teacher feedback and automated essay scoring were effective inenhancing students’ writing proficiency in vocational school, although the results ofIndependent Samples T-test indicated that the two kinds of feedback almost had the sameeffect on students’ writing proficiency;2) teacher feedback was more effective in improvingstudents’ discourse structure and content, compared with automated essay scoring. Butautomated essay scoring was particularly efficient in modifying students’ language expressionand grammar. The questionnaire demonstrated that students prefer teacher feedback in termsof its effectiveness and guiding significance in their future writing, but they did not deny thefunction and necessity of automated essay scoring. Although the research are positive, it hasmany limitations, such as the small size of experimental participants and the short duration ofstudy. Some implications and suggestions for future research are advised at the end of thethesis by the author. |
PDF Full Text Request