A Study On Guided Peer Feedback In College Non-English Majors’ Writing

English writing, as a reflection of ESL learners’ comprehensive language competence and one of the measurements of English learning, is assuming a large part and important role in teaching. However, the current situation of English writing teaching for college non-English majors as well as their writing ability is worrisome. In recent years, the process-oriented writing approach came to rise, advocating teachers and students to shift from assessing the products to exploring the process. As a result, peer feedback, as an essential part in process-oriented approach, has become a significant issue in the field of English education research.It was found that, based on a literature review, many previous studies on peer feedback in China were limited to English majors; many researches drew a theoretical supporting from the interactive theory or collaborative theory, which failed to highlight the role of socio-cultural context in peer feedback process and illustrate peer feedback in a systematic way. Thus, the writer is going to conduct an empirical study on guided peer feedback in college non-English major’s writing, from the perspective of activity theory.Adopting both qualitative and quantitative research method, the researcher aims to make out the following questions: 1) Does guided peer feedback benefit college non-English majors in writing? 2) If it does, in what aspects does guided peer feedback improve students’ writing? 3) How does the effect of guided peer feedback happen? 4) What is students’ attitude toward guided peer feedback like?Eighty-one students, from two classes of primary English level for non-English majors in S university were invited to participate in this research. Class(1), consisting of 43 students, was chosen randomly as the intervention group(IG) while the Class(2) worked as the control group(CG). During the fifteen-week teaching intervention, every participant had completed 3 writing tasks. The IG got peer feedback guiding in the beginning. In each writing task, they offered feedback, and then revised the drafts based on peer feedback, and finally finished the third draft according to teacher feedback while CG only received the feedback from teachers in the traditional way. Given an analysis and discussion of the data from pre-test and post-test with SPSS, the questionnaire, interview as well as students’ drafts, several conclusions could be drawn as follows:1) Guided peer feedback does help to improve college non-English majors’ writing ability. The students in IG made a greater progress, with mean score increasing by 1.75, than students in CG, whose improvement was nearly 0.5. 2) Students’ writing ability got improved, mainly in the aspects of grammar and vocabulary. They also made progress in content, not from peer feedback directly but as a result of the planning before writing and enlightenment from reading others’ drafts. 3) Peer feedback, as a social collective activity, is finished by cooperation. When revising the same piece of composition, peers may hold different motivations or opinions. They also differ with each other in writing proficiency, cognitive ability or style, emotions, etc, which determine their labor-division or roles in the activity. All of these are contradictions, which put the activity of peer feedback forward. To clear out the contradictions, peers have to communicate and negotiate within group members actively, through which the peer feedback is finished and students’ writing proficiency is enhanced. 4) The majority of students were willing to participate in the activity and incorporate peer feedback in writing revision. They agreed on the effectiveness of guided peer feedback. However, they did not think peer feedback could replace teacher feedback but suggested integrating it into writing instruction, because they were good complementary to each other and both were irreplaceable. They approved of the way of peer feedback first and then teacher feedback.