An Empirical Study On The Influence Of Two Feedback Modes On College English Writing-Based On IWrite2.0 Writing Evaluation System

With the rapid development of science and technology,computer systems have been gradually applied to the field of college English writing teaching.Based on this,the automated scoring system is developed to automatically evaluate students' compositions,which has become the trend and direction of future feedback research and development.As an emerging scoring tool in China,iWrite2.0 evaluation system has its unique advantages.However,research on this system from the pedagogical perspective is rarely seen,and most of the existing studies focus on the effect of this single feedback system.Relatively few studies combine this system with other types of feedback,such as teacher feedback.This paper aims to investigate the influence of two feedback modes(AWE feedback and teacher feedback plus AWE feedback)on college students' English writing as well as students' and the teacher's attitudes towards these two feedback modes.Meanwhile the following three research questions are proposed for detailed answers:(1)Is using iWrite2.0 system beneficial for improving students' English writing proficiency? If so,in what aspects?(2)In terms of these two feedback modes,which feedback mode is more effective and beneficial in improving students' writing level?(3)What are students' and the teacher's attitudes to and perception of these two types of feedback? The empirical study was conducted among a total of 84non-English students from two sophomore classes and a writing teacher in a university of Jiangxi province,adopting text analysis,questionnaire survey and interviews with students and the teacher as research methods.After ensuring that there exists no significant difference in the initial writing levels of the two classes in pretest,the classes were randomly divided into AWE feedback class and teacher feedback plus AWE feedback class.The experiment lasted for 13 weeks,during which the two classes completed the same three writing tasks and received corresponding writing feedback.In the last week of the experiment,the two classes took a post-test and questionnaires and interviews were completed subsequently.Through the comprehensive analysis of the data obtained from texts in pretest and post-test,questionnaires and interviews,the following findings were yielded:(1)iWrite2.0 evaluation system could promote students' writing proficiency,especially in terms of language and technical specifications;(2)These two writing feedback modes played a significant role in the improvement of college students' English writing ability to a certain extent.In comparison,the teacher feedback combined with automated writing evaluation system feedback was more effective than the single automated system feedback.The underlying reason is that the former feedback could compensate for the writing evaluation system in terms of content and text structure and thus improved students' writing proficiency in all the four aspects(language,content,text structure and technical specification);(3)The results of questionnaires and interviews manifested that compared with merely adopting the automated writing evaluation system,students were more satisfied with the combined feedback mode and expected to continue to receive this feedback.Most students desired to improve their writing proficiency through the combination of teacher feedback and automated writing evaluation system feedback.The implications of the above findings for teaching are illustrated as follows: the automated writing evaluation system is mechanical and thus fails to completely substitute the teacher's revision.Therefore,teacher feedback is still indispensable in the process of writing teaching.In addition,teachers are supposed to combine the artificial evaluation with the system evaluation effectively according to the actual situation of students,laying more emphasis on the revision of content,structure and logic of students' compositions.Moreover,the developers of the automated writing evaluation system should take full advantage of the artificial intelligence technology to make continuous improvement,adding the embellishment function for vocabulary and sentences as well as expanding the vocabulary or semantic associative lexicon,so as to provide more detailed and reasonable feedback to students from the aspects of discourse,content and logic.