Effects Of Three Types Of Feedback On College Students' English Writing

With development of “Process approach” in writing teaching,more and more researchers and educators emphasize the effect of written feedback,and teacher feedback has always been an important research topic in recent years.Also,automated essay scoring(AES)has became a research trend of writing feedback.However,most of the existing research focuses on comparisons between teacher feedback and peer feedback rather than AES,let alone the exploration to the combination of teacher feedback and automated essay scoring(T-A feedback).The present study aims to study the effects of teacher feedback,AES and T-A feedback on college students' English writing.It addresses the following research questions:(1)Can these three types of feedback play any positive roles in promoting students' writing proficiency?(2)Among the three types of feedback,which feedback is the most contributing one to the improvement of college students' writing proficiency?(3)What are the college students' perceptions of teacher feedback,AES and teacher-automated feedback? A total of 161 students from three parallel classes were selected in a University in Jiang Xi as participants of the experiment to have the pre-test.After the assurance of initial proficiency homogeneity,these classes were randomly arranged as teacher feedback(TF)class,AES class and T-A class.The experiment lasted for 13 weeks,during which three classes completed the same four writing tasks and received corresponding feedback.At last,the three classes were post-tested in the last week,and the corresponding questionnaires and interviews were conducted.Through quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis,the results show that: all these three types of feedback have a similar promoting effect on the improvement of college students' English writing ability.But in terms of four aspects of writing skills,different written feedback possesses its own characteristics.In comparisons,the teacher feedback plays a significant role in promoting the content and structure of students' compositions,and students also showed certain agreement to this.For AES,it focused on students' vocabulary and sentence,and it was helpful to stimulate students' revisions in compositions.But students still showed a larger opposition to the single use of AES.The combination of teacher feedback and AES can promote students' writing content,structure,sentence and vocabulary;and students' overallperformance is the best under such feedback.The students also show high acceptance to this type of feedback.The implications for the study are: teacher feedback is essential in writing teaching,but teachers should act more as guiders or participants instead of leaders.Meanwhile,the system of AES should be constantly improved.What's more,teachers should flexibly combine students' actual situations or feelings with the use of feedback,and it's necessary to make attempts to combine different feedbacks so as to take advantages and make up disadvantages for better instructions in writing.Finally,multiple-drafts are still necessary in College English writing.