An Empirical Study On The Effectiveness Of Teacher-plus-Automated Feedback To Junior Middle School Students' English Writing

As the key point of process-oriented approach,feedback has become a research focus in foreign language teaching.With the improvement of science and technology,automated essay scoring,as a new type of feedback,emerges in English writing teaching.However,compared with the researches on automated essay scoring abroad,there exist many limitations at home.Firstly,there are many review analyses at home,but lack related empirical studies.Moreover,the research objects are limited.The participants of the existing researches are mainly college students,and few studies have ever been conducted among middle school students,especially with junior middle school students.Furthermore,many studies at home are researched based on foreign automated essay scoring system,which may have problems with reliability and validity.And then,few studies have been carried out to compare teacher-plus-automated feedback with other ways of feedback.Therefore,in order to fill in the research gap,this study takes junior middle school students as subjects to research the effect of combining Jukuu and teacher feedback.Jukuu is domestic automatic scoring software,which is researched and developed independently.The paper aims to explore the effectiveness and students' perception of teacher-plus-automated feedback.The research questions are as follows:(1)What are the effects of teacher-plus-automated feedback on junior middle school students' English writing?(2)What is the students' perception of teacher-plus-automated feedback?On the bases of output and interaction hypothesis,this study makes use of both holistic and analytic scoring to investigate the influence of teacher-plus-automated feedback on junior middle school students' writing.The researcher randomly chooses two parallel classes from No.37 Middle School of Jinan to participate in the research.These two classes are served as experimental class(EC)and control class(CC)respectively.There are totally 78 students in these two classes(37 students in EC,41 students in CC).And the experiment lasts for sixteen weeks.The experimental class receives teacher-plus-automated feedback to their writing,and the control class gets only automated feedback.Descriptive statistics Independent-sample t test and Paired-sample t test are carefully used and the data are analyzed by SPSS 22.0.Comparing the horizontal and longitudinal data,the author arrives at the conclusions.Firstly,current English writing teaching in junior middle school is traditional-oriented.Students' writing proficiency is at a low level.Secondly,the experimental class makes more obvious progress in their writing,which is demonstrated in four aspects: vocabulary,grammar,content and organization.The experimental class improves more on content and organization and the control class on grammar and vocabulary,but the latter has slight backwards on text organization.Thirdly,most of the students in EC and CC hold a positive attitude towards automated scoring system,especially to the combination of teacher feedback and automated feedback.This study has realistic and instructive significance to the utilization of automated feedback to junior middle school students,especially the application of Jukuu scoring software.It furnishes front-line teachers with references in teaching.Meanwhile,in the course of essay scoring,teachers should recognize the advantages and deficiencies of teacher feedback and automated feedback.It is also required to integrate these advantages together.Then the efficacy of writing feedback will be higher and will be valued and accepted by students.Furthermore,the effective feedback can stimulate students' motivation in English writing.