The Empirical Research Of AWE On High School English Writing Instruction

Writing is considered to be the output that can best demonstrate learners' language proficiency.In the field of second language acquisition,writing has been bothering both educators and learners for many years.Fortunately,with the rapid development of technology and innovation,Automated Writing Evaluation has brought about new opportunities as well as challenges to the teaching of writing.Previous studies mainly focus on the validity and reliability of AWE and how it affects college writing instruction.Seldom do they touch upon teaching in the high-school level.Therefore,this thesis is aimed to investigate how AWE,take Pigai as an example,can effectively release teachers' burden and improve students' writing.Based on the attitudes of teachers and students towards AWE,how to incorporate the system into teaching is also discussed.To examine its effectiveness,present study employed a naturalistic course-based approach in instruction.By analyzing data collected from pre-test and post-test,interview of 12 students and questionnaire of 143 teachers,following conclusions could be made:AWE can,to some extent,release teachers' burden of grading,and improve students' writing,especially in terms of grammar and vocabulary for low and medium level students.However,to maximize its efficiency,teachers' feedback is still indispensable.Integrating AWE into high school English writing class needs further development of the system as well as regular update of the corpus.It also requires support from parents and school leaders,change of teachers' attitude and an analysis of students'zone of proximal development beforehand.As a teacher,to investigate,to practice and to innovate can shed light on implications in teaching,thus,bringing a win-win situation for students,themselves and their further research.