Utilizing an Automated Tool Analysis to Evaluate EFL Students’ Writing Performances

Abstract

Recently, the integration of linguistics and technology has been promoted and widely used in the field of linguistics and English writing research for several purposes. One of those purposes is to evaluate English as a Foreign Language (EFL) writing ability by using electronic assessment tools. In the current study, an automated writing evaluation tool (Coh-Metrix) was used to indicate English-major students’ writing performances based on the discourse components of the texts. The English texts generated for each writing task on two different topics were collected. The corpus analyses gathered from Coh-Metrix identified linguistic and discourse features that were interpreted to determine the 40 EFL undergraduate students’ English writing abilities. The students wrote and revised their essays in hand-written essays in class and resubmitted their essays in digital forms with corrections made. The results showed that these students demonstrated linguistic flexibility across writing assignments that they produced. The analyses also indicated that the length of the texts and the uses of the word concreteness, and the referential and deep cohesion had impacts on the students’ writing performances across the writing tasks. Besides, the findings suggest practical value in using an automated text analysis to support teachers’ instructional decisions that could help to identify improvement of students’ writing skill.

Effects of teacher, automated, and combined feedback on syntactic complexity in EFL students’ writing

“…Therefore, the assessment of syntactic complexity requires manual analysis to calculate the production units including phrases, clauses, and sentences. Though earlier studies employed a limited number of syntactic complexity measures (i.e., only two to five) (see Ortega, 2003), the use of online computational tools render the evaluation of syntactic complexity possible while overcoming the constraints of a labour-intensive nature of manual analysis (Petchprasert, 2021). As a result, recent studies have utilized automated tools to evaluate the syntactic complexity of students' writing including Coh-Metrix, and L2 Syntactic Complexity Analyzer (L2SCA).…”

Did you Run the Telegram? Use of Mobile Spelling Checker on Academic Writing

“…Many writing tools are available for personal, professional, and academic use (Skovhus, & Poulsen, 2021). Many teachers had been encouraged to investigate relocating or adopting new teaching techniques that include digital writing tools and settings by significantly increasing technology integration in the classroom (Petchprasert, 2021). Hicks and Bose (2019) had highlighted the need of adapting writing pedagogies to suit changing learner behaviours, especially when using new devices and on the go.…”