A Contrastive Study Of Teacher Feedback And Machine Feedback In College English Writing

As the core of process writing approach,feedback has always been one of the hot topics of researchers and front-line teachers.With the rapid development of educational technology and the popularization of computers,the machine scoring system has been gradually applied to second language writing to evaluate students’ compositions.Although many scholars have done a lot of empirical research on machine feedback,they mostly explore the effectiveness of machine in practical application.In view of this situation,the present study conducts a detailed textual analysis of the feedback provided by teachers and machines from a more detailed perspective and investigates students’ attitudes toward the two types of feedback,so that teachers can take effective measures to combine the two in composition feedback.In this study,the students’ compositions were respectively corrected by teachers and juku,an English composition automatic correction platform.Then these two different kinds of feedback were compared.The main research questions are as follows:(1)What are the similarities and differences between teacher feedback and machine feedback?(2)Which kind of feedback is more acceptable to students and popular with students?In view of the above research questions,the author collects 138 compositions of47 sophomores for analysis and comparison,seeking for similarities and differences between teacher feedback and machine feedback from three aspects: the focus of feedback information,the sentence type of feedback information and the function of feedback information.What’s more,a questionnaire survey is conducted to learn the current situation of English majors’ English writing,their attitudes towards teacher feedback and machine feedback,and the feedback mode students expect to get,which will provide suggestions for teachers to take targeted measures.The results show that the machine feedback and teacher feedback have their own unique strengths and weaknesses.Machine feedback can improve students’ vocabulary and grammar;teachers can effectively improve the ideological content and textual structure of student’s composition.Most of the machine feedback is imperative sentences,exclamatory sentences and declarative sentences,and the language is toomechanized.The feedback of teachers uses more declarative sentences and interrogative sentences,and the feedback is not only euphemistic,but also has the effect of questioning and guiding.In addition,the transmission function of machine feedback is more advantageous in this area,while teacher feedback is more prominent in the interactive function.Questionnaire survey results show that students are more inclined to choose teacher feedback due to the instruction of teacher feedback,but they do not deny their preference for machine feedback.They say they prefer the combination of two types of feedback and hope to get the teacher’s class comments.Based on the above results and related theoretical basis,the study concludes with some suggestions on how to combine the teacher feedback and the machine feedback to promote the development of students’ writing ability in English writing teaching.However,due to time,research design and other reasons,this study still needs to be further improved in terms of the representativeness of the subjects,the genre of the composition and the comprehensiveness of the questionnaire.