Cui Jiaoyang , Shi Lin

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Abstract

Based on MOE Statistics, 60% of Chinese students hail from English-speaking families in Singapore. For most of them, one of the greatest challenges in learning Chinese is essay-writing. These difficulties will convert to heavy marking workload for teachers as they have to spend much time grading students' essays which contain numerous language errors. With advancements in theoretical and technological research, we are now proposing a new solution to this problem. That is to develop a web-based Automatic Essay Evaluation system (AEE) whose focus is to provide immediate feedback on language use at the initial stage. The prototype has been designed to mark Chinese essays on the surface level regarding Chinese characters, collocations and syntactic structures. Once the prototype is established, user testing concerning its validity and usability is required. When it comes to the classroom testing, we will invite six schools involving 200 students to participate in AEE school testing. For each student, they will be suggested to compose their essays with two different methods, namely, AEE-assisted writing and pen-paper writing. For the former, essays will be automatically saved after users' submission, and the agreement between teachers and system after rating the same set of essays would serve to answer the Validity question. For the latter, other data will be collected after students completing essays with traditional way, such as survey, interviews, and lesson notes which would serve to answer the Usability question. This paper is mainly to introduce the prototype of such a system and discuss its validity and usability after applying in the first two classrooms.

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Keyword(s) :  automated, Chinese essay, evaluation, system testing, validity, usability