A Comparative Study on the Influence of Automated Evaluation System and Teacher Grading on Students' English Writing

This paper studies the influence of Writing Roadmap (TM) 2.0 (WRM) and teacher grading on student A and Student B respectively. By comparing the grades of pre-tests of both students, we found that, in the post-test essays, student A demonstrated much achievement in word choice, fluency and conventions while student B showed little improvement in these three dimensions. Compared with student B, student A's essay was superior to that of student B in the above three dimensions as well. The comparative research indicates that the feedback given by the WRM helped student A improve his writing proficiency effectively, especially in word choice, syntax, spelling and grammar. But the system couldn't provide student A with enough feedback and revision suggestions on ideas and contents as well as organization. On the contrary, the global scoring adopted by the teacher could only provide student B with limited feedback, thus was of little help to improve his writing quality. (c) 2011 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Selection and/or peer-review under responsibility of Harbin University of Science and Technology