A Study On The Effectiveness Of Peer Feedback On College English Writing

Although peer feedback has been shown to be beneficial in many writing classrooms, the benefit of peer feedback to the reviewer, or the student giving feedback, has not been thoroughly investigated in second-language writing context. The purpose of this study is to determine which is more beneficial to improving student writing:giving or receiving peer feedback, and on which writing aspects do they improve.The study was conducted at a university in northern Jiangsu Province with seventy non-English majors at the same proficiency level, who were randomly divided into experimental group (EG) and control group (CG). Each group is comprised of35sophomore students. The mean score of writing in the final examination of last term was almost the same, ensuring the two groups were at the same writing proficiency before experiment. At the beginning of the experiment, two groups received training on peer feedback:The EG was trained on how to give feedback, and they reviewed anonymous papers from CG but received no peer feedback over the course of the semester. The CG was trained on how to use feedback and they received feedback but did not review students’ essays from EG.Students in both experimental group and control group finished three writing tasks in the research, and each task lasted for three weeks. The first writing task was for practice, which was finished in the training session to train students to give and use peer feedback. The second and third writing were finished in the period of the application of giving and receiving peer feedback. The author kept detailed records of these two tasks for data analysis. The research instruments include pre-test and post-test, questionnaire, drafts tasks and interview. At last, SPSS18.0was used to analyze the data.An analysis in the gains in writing ability measured from writing samples collected at the beginning and end of the semester indicated that the givers (defined as students in EG), who focused solely on reviewing peers’papers and giving feedback, achieved more significant gains in their own writing than the receivers (defined as students in CG), who focused solely on how to use peer feedback. The improvements were mainly reflected in organization, cohesion, structure and vocabulary. Secondly, the results from the drafts indicate that most of the givers are good at offering feedback on mechanics, vocabulary and organization. In addition, with the help of the questionnaire survey, it can be found that giving peer feedback can help students to pay more attention to the organization, bring inspirations and reduce linguistic errors in writing, which can improve the accuracy of students’ writing. Despite those findings, most of the students value teacher feedback more useful and authoritative than peer feedback even though they hold positive attitude towards giving and receiving peer feedback, shown in the results of the questionnaire survey and interview.So in the future college English writing classes, peer feedback especially giving peer feedback should be adopted as a complement to teacher feedback to lighten teachers’ workload and promote Chinese college students’ writing proficiency.