EFL teachers and feedback fatigue: AI to the rescue?

With research showing the benefits of feedback, teachers have come under increasing pressure to provide more, including more personalised, and more detailed responses to students. This often places heavy demands on teachers and with ever-larger class sizes and heavier workloads, teacher fatigue and burn-out are common. Automation has the potential to change all this and new digital resources have already proven to be valuable in supporting L2 writing. In this paper I look at the contribution of Automated Writing Evaluation (AWE) programmes and Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) to feedback. The ability to provide instant local and global 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 haven’t we heard this all before? Are these empty claims which raise our expectations of removing some of the drudgery of mundane grammar correction? Most importantly, what is the role of teachers in all this, and can AI really improve writers and not just texts?