A Rule-Based AI Writing Assistant for Beginner English Learners with Visual Feedback

Abstract

The increasing adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) in educational technology has created new opportunities to support second language (L2) writing development. Beginner English learners often struggle with grammatical accuracy, limited vocabulary, and unclear sentence construction, while immediate and individualized feedback remains difficult to provide in traditional learning settings. This study proposes a rule-based AI writing assistant designed to deliver automated, transparent, and interpretable feedback for beginner-level English writing without relying on data-intensive machine learning models. The system employs symbolic AI principles through predefined grammatical rules and heuristic textual metrics to evaluate writing quality across three dimensions: grammar accuracy, vocabulary richness, and text clarity. Grammar errors are detected using regular expression-based rules, vocabulary quality is measured via lexical diversity ratios, and clarity is estimated using a length-based heuristic. These metrics are normalized and combined to produce an overall writing quality score. To enhance usability and learner engagement, the system integrates visual feedback elements, including progress bars, graphical score representations, and animated character responses. Functional testing using sample beginner texts demonstrates that the proposed system effectively identifies common writing issues, provides consistent scoring, and delivers immediate, explainable feedback. The results indicate that rule-based AI, when combined with visual feedback mechanisms, can offer a lightweight, efficient, and pedagogically meaningful solution for beginner English writing support. This approach is particularly suitable for educational contexts that prioritize explainability, accessibility, and low computational requirements.