A Study On The Effectiveness Of Applying The Peer Feedback Strategy To The English Writing Instruction In Senior High School

To a great extent,English writing reflects the learners’ comprehensive proficiency to use the language.Therefore,improving the learners’ English writing proficiency is an important goal of English teaching,and English writing teaching has been paid more and more attention.How to explore and use effective methods to improve the students’ English writing ability has become one of the focuses of English writing teaching.Peer feedback,as a formative evaluation method,has attracted more and more attention due to its effective role in promoting students’ communication and cooperation.However,the existing research rarely involves the specific strategies used by senior high school students in the process of peer feedback,and also fails to analyze the factors that affect the use of peer feedback strategies.Ecolinguistics is a new interdisciplinary subject which combines ecology and linguistics.It regards teaching as an organic subject,and teachers,students and teaching environment as ecological factors,which is of great significance to foreign language teaching.Based on the concept framework and theoretical guidance of ecolinguistics and activity theory,this paper uses peer feedback as an evaluation method in English writing teaching in order to create a dynamic and balanced teaching ecological environment,focusing on students’ strategy use in peer feedback and the factors that affect their use of peer feedback.This study attempts to answer the following three questions:(1)Can peer feedback improve senior high school students’ English writing ability?If so,what aspects of students’ writing will be affected?(2)What strategies do students use in peer feedback in English writing?(3)What factors affect the use of peer feedback strategies?In this study,102 students in class 3 and class 4 of grade 2 in Ji’an No.3 Senior High School of Jiangxi Province were investigated for 10 weeks by pre-test,posttest,interview and questionnaire.The major findings are summarized as follows:(1)Peer feedback can improve the composition ability of students at different proficiency levels,in all aspects(content,grammar,vocabulary,organization and the whole),among which the students at intermediate proficiency level improved the most,especially in grammar.(2)The students adopted the following five major strategies in peer feedback: L1(Mandarin Chinese)and L2(English),L2 writing criteria,rules of group activity,seeking help from teachers and other group members as well as playing different roles;(3)From the perspective of ecolinguistics,students’ strategies use are mainly affected by environmental factors(classroom environment,teacher instruction,etc.)and personal factors(students’ proficiency level,personal beliefs,etc.)in the process of peer feedback,which promote students’ writing performance and writing enthusiasm.Therefore,from the perspective of ecolinguistics,peer feedback can effectively improve senior high school students’ English writing ability.This study introduces an ecological linguistic perspective into the teaching of English writing,and explores the relationship between the factors of using peer feedback strategies and the teaching ecological environment,which has certain guiding significance for the teaching practice of English writing.