Impact Of Online Formative Evaluation On EFL College Students' Writing Vocabulary

Vocabulary as one of the most difficult and important aspects of teaching and learning in EFL writing classes has always been a focal point of discussion for scholars.In the traditional writing class,burdened with the pressure of teaching,e.g.the larger number of students and external evaluative interference,teachers could hardly choose effective methods,which consume large amount of time in preparation and rating,in their teaching to improve students' writing vocabulary.Recent years,with massive utilization of online automated scoring tools,it is feasible for teachers to assign regular writing tasks and let the online automated scoring tools partly take over the job of feedback and evaluate EFL learners' lexical competency.More and more practitioners choose to apply formative assessment instruments(such as pigai.org.)to teaching of writing.Many studies have shown that online formative assessment tools have important implications for improving writing vocabulary,but there is a lack of further empirical analysis of lexical richness.Therefore,based on the formative assessment theories,this paper studies the influence of pigai.org,an online automated scoring platform,on the lexical diversity,lexical complexity,lexical density and lexical accuracy in EFL college students' writing vocabularyWith 54 freshmen of a key university in Beijing(directly under the Ministry of Education)recruited as the research informants,the researcher selected 120 compositions from their weekly submissions which had been revised for more than five times on pigai.org.A quantitative data analysis was conducted with the help of RANGE software and the UAM Corpus Tool 3.0 analysis software,which could help analyze the value of lexical density,type value and token value,as well as the lexical ratio in BASEWORD1,BASEWORD2 and BASEWORD3.Then,the researcher analyzed the differences of lexical diversity,lexical density,lexical complexity and lexical accuracy on SPSS 17.0.Moreover,a questionnaire survey and follow-up interviews were conducted to investigate the impact of vocabulary feedback given by pigai.org and how students use pigai.org to modify their writing vocabulary.To achieve all these goals,the following three questions are addressed:1)What kind of feedback was given by pigai.org?2)How did pigai.org feedback influence students' lexical richness in college English writing?3)How do the students perceive and evaluate pigai.org feedback on vocabulary?The results of composition analysis show that the differences both on lexical diversity and lexical accuracy between before and after using pigai.org are statistically significant at 0.05 level,which shows that the lexical level in the last version has been improved,but the differences on lexical density and lexical complexity are not significant.Besides,the results of questionnaire and interview show that students think highly of using pigai.org in their writing class,yet they suggest,in practice,pigai.org feedback should be supplemented with peer feedback and teacher feedback.After analyzing and synthesizing the experimental data,the researcher gave several suggestions on how to integrate pigai.org into the writing class.This research provides more valuable suggestions for writing teaching and also enriches the research on formative assessment and lexical richness.