| There is no doubt that feedback plays a vital role in improving students' writing abilities.In the traditional English writing class,teacher feedback is untimely,which has certain negative impacts on the revising condition of college students' compositions.With the rapid development of science and technology,the automatic writing evaluating system(hereinafter referred to as AWE)developed based on corpus and artificial intelligence provides a new feedback mode for second language writing,that is,AWE feedback.AWE feedback has received widespread attention because of its convenient and instantaneous feedback and also has been questioned due to its technological limitations.Therefore,this study plans to combine the teacher feedback and AWE feedback,aiming to effectively improve college English students' writing abilities.Two non-English major classes from Wuhan University of Science and Technology are chosen to be the subjects of the experiment.During the process,the experimental class receives the AWE feedback plus teacher feedback,while the control class only receives AWE feedback.The paper tries to answer the following three questions: 1)Whether AWE feedback plus teacher feedback is more effective than AWE feedback in improving college English students' English writing proficiency and mainly in what aspects? 2)What is the college English students' attitude towards AWE feedback and AWE feedback plus teacher feedback? 3)Whether college English students' writing motivation in experimental class would change after receiving AWE feedback plus teacher feedback? Quantitative and qualitative analysis are adopted to analyze students' holistic scores and analytic scores in pretest and posttest,questionnaires and reflection journals to figure out the impact of AWE feedback and AWE feedback plus teacher feedback on college English students' writing proficiency,attitude and motivation.The result indicates that,firstly,there is a significant difference between two classes' holistic scores in posttest.The mean score of experimental class is higher than that of control class,which indicates the AWE feedback plus teacher feedback can more effectively improve college English students' writing abilities,especially in content and organization.In addition,their holistic scores and analytic scores all increase respectively after the experiment.The AWE feedback performs well in significantly improving college English students' grammar,vocabulary and sentencestructure.However,the AWE feedback plus teacher feedback is superior in improving college English students' writing abilities in all five aspects,namely,grammar,content,vocabulary,sentence structure and organization.Secondly,the results from questionnaire survey and reflection journals indicate that students from experimental class are more willing to receive the AWE feedback plus teacher feedback.They further suggest that the AWE feedback plus teacher feedback is of more help to improve their writing proficiency and writing motivation.Although there are many limitations in this study,it still can provide some enlightenment for English writing teaching in the future.The results also show that AWE feedback and teacher feedback can be combined to complement each other's disadvantages and maximize the benefits of English writing feedback in the future college English writing teaching. |
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