An Empirical Study on the Impact of an Automated Writing Assessment on Chinese College Students’ English Writing Proficiency

Automated writing evaluation (AWE) is an online essay scoring system which can provide feedback and revising advice to teachers and students. In this paper, an empirical study was carried out to explore the impact of Writing Roadmap2.0 (WRM2.0)-an automated writing assessment system on the English writing proficiency, which is reflected in three dimensions-the language form, the contextual structure and the writing quality of non-English major freshmen in China. In this study, 100 participants were divided into the experimental class (EC) and the controlled one (CC) at random, with 50 ones in each class. Both qualitative method and quantitative method were adopted for data collection and analysis, including the pre- and post-tests on WRM2.0, teacher-assessed writing task and interviews. The results revealed that while there was no significant difference in the writing proficiency in pre-test on WRM2.0 between EC and CC, the former outperformed the latter in both post-test on WRM2.0 and teacher-assessed writing task in the final exam in two dimensions: the language form and the writing quality. With regard to the aspect of contextual structure, EC benefited a little on WRM2.0. Generally speaking, this empirical study observed positive impact of WRM2.0 on writing proficiency of L2 students in China. It is expected that the findings will provide references for the further integration of AWE with writing teaching and learning in the EFL classroom.