An automated essay-evaluation corpus of English as a Foreign Language writing

The Report of Chinese Students' English Writing Ability (2014) focuses on the Chinese students' English writing in the automated essay-evaluation context. The data and samples are primarily from a national-wide writing project involving 300814 English as a Foreign Language participants from 452 schools in China during a period of April 10 to May 10, 2014. Aiming to formulate a liable and detailed description of English writing ability of the target learners, a variety of data were collected and processed by means of dimensional analysis, including the frequency vocabulary and collocation, average length of vocabulary, sentence and essay, average number of paragraph, vocabulary richness, density of subordinate clause, most frequent errors, etc. In addition, background information of the participants was also solicited. The corpus-based analysis is still ongoing, and some results have already revealed meaningful trend and characteristics in the writing of Chinese students. Also, the observation of participants' learning behavior signifies meaningful implications for future automated essay-evaluation projects.