The Effects Of Automated Writing Evaluation Feedback On Graduate Students' English Writing Complexity, Accuracy And Fluency

With the development of modern educational technology,Automated Writing Evaluation(AWE)systems,which are featured by online writing,intelligent grading,automated feedback,have been widely used in English writing teaching.Currently,the research about Automated Writing Evaluation(AWE)feedback has become a trend.Many researchers have investigated the effects of AWE feedback on students' English writing.The research subjects were mostly undergraduates including English and non-English majors.But,studies on how effective the AWE feedback is for graduates' English writing are limited.English writing plays a crucial role in graduates' academic life.Many universities,therefore,set the English writing as a compulsory course.However,graduates' language ability in English writing is still unsatisfactory in our country.Researchers hold that complexity,accuracy and fluency could successfully measure learners' language ability.In view of this,the present study is aimed to examine the effects of the AWE feedback on graduates' English writing complexity,accuracy and fluency,so as to provide valuable advice for English writing teaching in our country.Based on the English writing course,the present study took the “pigai.org” as the writing and feedback tool.The study was conducted for sixteen weeks.The research subjects were thirty non-English major graduates from a comprehensive university in Shanxi province.Students' writing samples and a questionnaire were used to address the following research questions:(1)What effects does Automated Writing Evaluation(AWE)feedback have on Chinese graduate students' English writing complexity?(2)What effects does Automated Writing Evaluation(AWE)feedback have on Chinese graduate students' English writing accuracy?(3)What effects does Automated Writing Evaluation(AWE)feedback have on Chinese graduate students' English writing fluency?(4)What is the graduate students' attitude towards Automated Writing Evaluation(AWE)feedback? To measure the accuracy of the writing samples,the study calculated the errors per 100 words in each composition based on the norm error counts recorded by the “pigai.org”.The L2 Syntactic Complexity Analyzer(L2SCA)and L2 Lexical Complexity Analyzer(L2LCA)were used to analyze the syntactic complexity,lexical complexity.Fluency was calculated by the number of words per clause in a composition.The number of words and clauses was automatically counted by the L2 SCA.Then,SPSS 17.0 was employed to do data analysis.The research results showed that the AWE feedback had a favorable effect on graduates' English writing accuracy and lexical complexity.But for fluency and syntactic complexity,no significant positive influence was found.The questionnaire results revealed that the AWE feedback helped students mostly in correcting language errors and using diversified vocabulary.However,students did not accept the effect of the AWE feedback on syntax.As for fluency,although the AWE program stimulated them to write longer essays,the AWE feedback was not helpful in increasing the length of clauses.The results indicate that students should make full use of the AWE feedback to improve their writing accuracy and lexical diversity;teachers should give students targeted feedback on syntax to improve their syntactic ability in writing;the AWE developers should improve the system's feedback mechanism,providing more detailed,accurate and reliable feedback.