The impact of online automated feedback on students' reflective journal writing in an EFL course

The study employed an embedded mixed-method design using reflective journals, survey and interview to investigate the impact of online automated feedback (OAF) on the quality of students' reflective journals in a 13 week English as Foreign Language (EFL) course at university level. One hundred and thirty-eight undergraduate students participated in the study, and they were divided into two groups: experimental (N = 82) and control (N = 56). Participants in both groups received the same instruction on reflective writing by the same teacher, but the experimental group could access a web-based classification system to generate OAF on their second and third reflective journals while the control group could not. Results show that the experimental group outperformed the control group in terms of the overall score for the final reflective journal, and the experimental group also demonstrated a significant improvement in scores across reflective journals. While data collected from an online questionnaire survey and focus group interviews generally support the value of OAF for reflective writing, a number of student concerns were noted. Overall, the findings of this study can contribute to a better understanding of the impact of OAF on reflective writing and provide a basis for future discussion on how to blend teacher feedback and OAF to support reflective writing.