The Influence of Automatic Essay Evaluation and Bilingual Concordancing on EFL Students' Writing

Abstract

本研究旨在探討自動寫作評分系統MyAccess與雙語字彙索引系統TOTALrecall對臺灣大學生英文寫作之影響。MyAccess提供作文品質評 分及回饋，而TOTALrecall則輔助學生用字選擇與修正用字錯誤。十九位外語系學生參與研究，實驗後填寫評估問卷。每次寫作後，則填寫一份使用紀錄 表，以記錄使用MyAccess的情況與TOTALrecall所查詢之單字。資料分析結果顯示MyAccess的回饋確能幫助學生寫作，尤在全文重點及 表達意義方面有顯著效益。TOTALrecall能輔助學生選擇適當用字，而學生作文中過半數須更正的錯誤亦藉此系統改正。為改進這兩項工具，學生們提供 一些具體建議。

The purpose of this study was to investigate how effective an automatic essay grading system and a bilingual concordancer would be in helping college EFL students with their writing specifically with self-correction of errors and improvement of textual quality. Nineteen college freshmen majoring in English participated in this study. Two online learning tools were applied: an automatic grading system, MyAccess, for grading writing and providing feedback, and a web-based bilingual concordancer, TOTALrecall, for helping students with word usage problems in their drafts and self-correcting errors highlighted by the teacher. Research instruments used were an evaluation questionnaire as well as checklists on which students recorded feedback used from MyAccess and words looked up from TOTALrecall. Results indicate that students consider feedback from MyAccess helpful for revision, especially with focus and meaning of their essays. Additionally, TOTALrecall is regarded as a powerful tool in helping students choose appropriate and accurate words for writing. Over half of the errors in the essays were corrected with the help from TOTALrecall. Students also suggested that more specific feedback from My Access and further refinement of TOTALrecall in expanding its corpus size are necessary for increasing effectiveness of the learning tools.