THE READING MATRIX:AN INTERNATIONAL ONLINE JOURNAL, vol.21, no.2, pp.66-84, 2021 (Peer-Reviewed Journal)
Providing both effective feedback applications and reliable assessment practices are two
central issues in ESL/EFL writing instruction contexts. Giving individual feedback is very
difficult in crowded classes as it requires a great amount of time and effort for instructors.
Moreover, instructors likely employ inconsistent assessment procedures, which poses a threat
to the reliability of the assessment results. Automated Writing Evaluation (AWE) systems were
developed to address these issues and have been subjected to a number of research studies so
far. This paper presents a literature review regarding the development of AWE systems and the
studies that were conducted to investigate the use of these systems for teaching and assessing
writing in the last two decades. Based on the review of previous research, it is suggested that
more studies are carried out to investigate the effectiveness of automated feedback when it is
integrated with teacher feedback and the reliability of automated scoring in classroom-based
writing assessment contexts.