| As an important output form,writing is an indispensable factor to evaluate college students' comprehensive level and practiced ability of English.Writing has risen large amount of attention in English education,yet correction of the English composition is one of the most complicated problems in college English writing teaching.On one hand,there is no specific English writing class in college English curriculum,and the class size is comparatively larger,the work of heavy load of feedback has consequences on the time and quality of feedback.On the other hand,an investigation found that some students are not interested in writing and their writing motivations are poor,some even are afraid of writing or resist writing.Their writing levels are far away from the requirements of teaching goals(Wang Yi,Xuan an & Chen Yongjie,2006).It is necessary to find a reasonable way of feedback which can stimulate students' interest in writing and improve their writing performance.The application of automatic scoring system abroad has been widely used,and many scholars found that its powerful function and efficiency of correcting are fit to the actual situation of college English writing teaching in China.On the basis of previous studies,this study makes a further discussion on the effect of the automatic scoring system in English writing teaching.Based on the theory of self-efficacy,formative assessment,and constructivism theory,taking the“Pigai.org” as a typical form of automatic scoring system,combining quantitative and qualitative research methods,this study conducts an English writing teaching experiment in 12 weeks with 42 freshmen majoring in Network Engineering in Taiyuan Institute of Industrial as the research subjects.Research tools mainly includes questionnaire,writing tests and interview,aiming to address the following research questions: 1)Has college students' writing self-efficacy improved after using the automatic scoring system?If yes,what are they? 2)Have the writing performances of students with different levels improved after using the automatic scoring system? If yes,what are they? 3)Is there any relationship between times of online self-revision,writing self-efficacy and writing performances?This study includes the quantitative and qualitative data.Quantitative data mainly comes from two questionnaires and writing tests both at the beginning of the semester and at the end of the semester,and the data is analyzed by SPSS 17.0.The qualitative data primarily comes from the semi-structured interview which is to further understand how the Pigai.org affects college students' writing self-efficacy and writingscores.The findings indicate that:1)There are significant improvements in students' writing self-efficacy in using Pigai.org,which are mainly showed from two aspects,the writing skill self-efficacy and writing task self-efficacy.2)After using Pigai.org,students in different level have improved in the total score of writing,but there are some differences in detailed aspects of writing.The improvement of high level students mainly reflects in the aspects of discourse structure,while low level students mainly make progress in lexical and sentence pattern.In terms of the content of writing,both high level students and low level students have no significant improvement.3)Times of online self-revision has no significant correlation with students' writing self-efficacy and writing performance.Students who take part in the interview shows that compared with times of online self-revision,the quality of self-revision is more important.According to the results of this study,the automatic scoring system has auxiliary function in teaching college English writing,and also influences students' writing self-efficacy and writing performance positively.In addition,this thesis also explains the limitations in the process of studying,elaborates the enlightenment to college English writing teaching and puts forward suggestions for further studies. |
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