With research showing the benefits of corrective feedback to both student writing and student writers, teachers have come under increasing pressure in recent years to provide more, more personalised, and more detailed responses to students. This often places heavy demands on teachers. With ever-larger class sizes and heavier workloads, teacher fatigue and burn out are common, so that in the UK, for example, less than a quarter of university teachers remain in the profession ten years after beginning teaching. New digital resources have already proven to be a valuable resource in supporting L2 writing and teaching, offering automatic translation, error correction, automated scoring systems, and other benefits common in writing classrooms. In this paper I look at what they bring to feedback. Beginning with an overview of what research shows feedback offers students, I explore the contribution of Automated Writing Evaluation (AWE) programmes and Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) to feedback. The ability to provide instant local and global written corrective feedback across multiple drafts targeted to student needs and in greater quantities promises to increase learner motivation and autonomy while relieving teachers of hours of marking. But are these empty claims raising expectations and removing some of the drudgery of mundane grammar correction? What is the role of teachers in all this and can AI really improve writers and not just texts?
Ken Hyland is an Honorary Professor at the University of East Anglia. He has published over 320 articles and 30 books on writing and academic discourse with over 96,000 citations on Google Scholar. A fifth edition of his Teaching and Researching Writing will be published by Routledge in 2025. According to the Stanford/Elsevier analysis of the Scopus database, he has been the most influential scholar in language and linguistics for the past 3 years (2022, 2023, 2024). A collection of his work, The Essential Hyland, was published in 2018 by Bloomsbury. He is the Editor of two book series with Routledge and Bloomsbury, is a visiting professor at Jilin University in China and a Foundation Fellow of the Hong Kong Academy of the Humanities. He was founding co-editor of the Journal of English for Academic Purposes and co-editor of Applied Linguistics.