A Comparative Study On The Effects Of Two Different Feedback Methods On College Students English Writing

With the development of computer technology, a new form of feedback is provided which is called Automated Essay Scoring (AES). AES has applied in English writing and it's necessary to combing automated feedback by AES with artificial feedback.This study aims to investigate the impact of two different types of feedback on college students'English writing. One is AES feedback and another is combing AES feedback with teacher feedback on the writing by the experiment and attempts to find out a more effective way of feedback for college English writing. Then, three research questions are focused in the study:1. To what extent do the two different feedback methods (Group A receiving AES feedback, Group B receiving AES plus teacher feedback) play positive roles in improving student writing proficiency respectively?2. What's students'attitude towards AES feedback and AES plus teacher feedback?3. What is the influence of the experiment on the students writing process?In order to address the three research questions, an experiment was carried out in two classes of Hunan University, each class has 30 students. The Finance class was regarded as group A, who received feedback from AES, and then the Insurance class was regarded as group B, who received the feedback from AES and teacher (AES plus teacher feedback). The pre-test and post test writing, holistic scores and analytic reports were collected and analyzed by SPSS 21.0. Then two questionnaires and an interview were collected and provided qualitative data.Here are the major findings in the study. First, for holistic sores and analytic report, the result of Independent-sample T-test demonstrates that the holistic scores of the writing in posttest have significant difference between group A and group B. For analytic report, group A and group B have significant difference in average word length, high-frequency words, words for coherence and sentence accuracy except number of words and clause number. Second, for holistic scores, the result of Paired-sample T-test demonstrates holistic scores of students'writing in group A and group B are both improved and the scores of group B are raised higher than that of group A. For and analytic report, the results of Paired-sample T-test demonstrates that there is significant difference in average word length, high-frequency words, academic words and word for coherence, except number of words and clause number in the pretest and posttest in group B while there is no significant difference in group A except high-frequency words and academic words. Third, students hold different attitude towards AES feedback and AES plus teacher feedback. More students prefer AES plus teacher feedback.To sum up, although the study has some limitations, it can still provide some pedagogical implications for teaching college English writing. With the guidance of teacher, the students can make multiple writings based on the AES and improve students' writing. The combination of AES and teacher feedback can be effective way of improving students' writing proficiency.