Developing a System to Support Formative Teacher Feedback in Foreign Language Writing

Formative feedback can help both learners and teachers confirm the ongoing acquisition of language. In this paper, we propose an approach to support formative teacher feedback by tracking learners' acquisition on foreign language writing. We built a prototype system to extract grammars that have been learned from learners' sentences and provide teachers with learners' acquisition on the grammars. The teachers could provide feedback based on the system output over time. Two experiments were carried out on Japanese learners of Chinese in beginner-level and intermediate level classrooms. The increase on the correct answer rates confirms the effectiveness of formative teacher feedback and clarifies the potential of the system.

I. Introduction

In the past decades, formative feedback has been considered as an indispensable component [1], [2]. According to Shute [2], formative feedback is defined as information communicated to learners which supports the learning process and enhances learning. It consists of a variety of different types and is managed at various times during the learning process. Moreover, formative feedback is effective to motivate revision of drafts in foreign language writing [3]. Despite many advantages, providing feedback can be both time consuming and costly in classrooms. Thus, automated feedback has drawn much attention gradually [4].