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.