An Empirical Study On Peer Assessment In Junior High School English Writing Teaching

Writing teaching as a part of English teaching,plays an important role in cultivating students’ ability of using English comprehensively.However,how to improve students’ English writing ability has always been a tough problem to handle in English writing teaching.Many teachers and researchers have made great efforts to solve this problem while have little effectiveness.Since 1970 s,the focus of the researches on writing teaching has gradually shifted from product-based writing approach to process-based writing approach.Thus peer assessment,as a part of process-based approach,has been attached great importance by domestic and foreign researchers.Through a large number of theoretical and empirical studies,many scholars have demonstrated that peer review can improve students’ writing ability,foster students’ spirit of cooperation and independent thinking ability.However,there are still questions about the effectiveness and feasibility of implementing peer assessment in L2 class.In addition,majority of scholars focused on the studies on peer assessment in colleges or senior high schools,few of the researchers carried out the experiment in junior high schools.In view of this,based on the theory foundation of Cooperative Learning,the Zone of Proximal Development and Scaffolding,the author designed and carried out an empirical study on peer assessment with 130 students from two classes of grade nine in the Affiliated Middle School of Henan Normal University.The purpose of this study is to testify the effectiveness of peer assessment in junior high school English writing class and the attitude of junior high school students.This thesis employed class observation,pre-test and post-test,questionnaire,interview as the research instruments.Two research questions were addressed in this research as follows:1)What’s the impact of peer assessment on junior high school students’ writing ability?2)What is the attitude of junior high school students towards peer assessment?This paper analyzed the data of pre-test and post-test by SPSS 17.0,as well as the analyses of the contents of questionnaire and interview.The results are as follows: 1)Through the comparative analyses of the results of the pre-test and post-test in the experimental class and the control class,it can be concluded that peer assessment can help junior high school students improve their English writing ability,but students are still have dependency to teachers’ assessment.2)The results of questionnaire and interview show that junior high school students are easy to accept peer assessment and generally have a positive attitude towards it.To sum up,peer assessment has a positive effectiveness in improving junior high school students’ English writing ability.It can also cultivate students’ cooperative spirit,and help teachers to guide students’ writing.It is acceptable in junior high school students especially accompany with teachers’ assessment.Therefore,this thesis suggests that peer assessment should be applied in junior high school English class as a complementary assessment method in English writing teaching.