A Study On The Effectiveness Of Peer Feedback In Senior High School English Writing

Writing not only reflects learners’ comprehensive language skills and language abilities but also plays an important role in senior high school English writing.However,the current situation of senior high school English writing is unsatisfying and worrisome.Specifically,students are not interested in writing,and their compositions are lack of coherence and substance,etc.Thus,it is essential to explore effective methods to improve students’ writing performance.Peer feedback,as a crucial step in process writing approach,has been applied in College English writing teaching,and its advantages lie in that it can provide students with much more comprehensive and detailed feedback.But,up to now the related research has rarely been conducted in senior high school English writing.Based on the process-focused writing approach and Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development,the empirical study attempts to examine the effects of peer feedback on senior high school English writing.To be specific,the study addresses the following three questions:(1)To what extent does the peer feedback affect students’ English writing proficiency?(2)How does peer feedback affect students’ composition revision?(3)What are the students’ attitudes towards peer feedback?The experiment lasts 16 weeks from September 11 th,2017 to December 29 th,2017.The research subjects come from two parallel classes—Class 1and Class 2 in Anyang No.1 Senior High School.Class 1(56 students)is selected as the experimental class(EC),and Class 2(55 students)is the control class(CC).Students in EC receive pre-training before the implementation of peer feedback.During the experiment,they first provide suggestions for each other with the help of peer feedback sheet.And then they are required to rewrite the compositions according to these suggestions.At last,they finish the third draft based on teacher feedback.While in CC the teacher is the only source of revisions,and the students just need to rewrite the compositions under the assistance of teacher feedback.The research instruments include pre-test and post-test,students’ drafts and peer feedback sheets,and the questionnaire and interview.All the data is analyzed by SPSS19.0.The results of the study suggest that(1)The application of peer feedback in English writing teaching can significantly improve students’ writing performance.(2)The application of peer feedback in English writing teaching,under the assistance of repeated use of feedback sheet,students start to pay as much attention to the deep-level changes: content,organization and text design as to the use of language itself.(3)The majority of students hold positive attitudes towards peer feedback.They believe peer feedback can help them reduce grammatical errors,enrich their minds and make them clarify how to write,etc.But some students hold the opposite view that peer feedback is time-consuming,laborious and not as authoritative as teacher feedback.To achieve better results,peer feedback should be combined with teacher feedback in senior high school English writing teaching.