An Empirical Study On The Effects Of Peer Feedback On Senior High School Students’ English Writing Self-efficacy

Writing self-efficacy refers to students’ subjective judgment on whether or to what extent they believe they can successfully use writing skills and complete specific writing tasks when writing in particular situations.Some studies have pointed out that as an important part of writing teaching,feedback has a certain impact on students’ writing self-efficacy.Compared with teacher feedback,peer feedback may exert more significant positive effects on students’ writing self-efficacy.Peer feedback can refer to the suggestions and comments learners give on the revision of peers’ written texts.It also includes the cognitive process and meaning negotiation process of commenting on peers’ written texts,as well as the social interaction process of constructing written texts.At present,there are few empirical studies on the effects of peer feedback on senior high school(SHS)students’ writing self-efficacy at home and abroad.At the same time,its effects on two dimensions of SHS students’ writing self-efficacy should be further confirmed.Therefore,this study conducted empirical research on peer feedback in SHS English writing classes and explored its effects on SHS students’ English writing self-efficacy,aiming to enrich the research in the field of peer feedback and writing self-efficacy.In this study,questionnaires and semi-structured interviews were used as the research instruments for the empirical research and two senior one classes in a senior high school in Nanchong City were selected as parallel classes.In the 14-week experiment,the experimental group adopted the peer feedback writing evaluation model,while the control class adopted the traditional writing evaluation model.The study aims to explore the following two questions:(1)What effects does peer feedback exert on SHS students’ English writing self-efficacy?(2)What are the differences in the effects of peer feedback on the English writing self-efficacy of SHS students with different English proficiency?The results have shown that:(1)Peer feedback can significantly improve SHS students’ overall English writing self-efficacy,English writing skill self-efficacy and English writing task self-efficacy.In terms of the two dimensions of English writing self-efficacy,peer feedback improves SHS students’ English writing skill self-efficacy more significantly than English writing task self-efficacy;(2)There are differences in the effects of peer feedback on the English writing self-efficacy of SHS students with different English proficiency.The enhancement of the overall English writing self-efficacy of middle-and low-proficiency students is more significant than that of high-proficiency students.In addition,on the two dimensions of writing self-efficacy,peer feedback has positive effects on the writing skill self-efficacy and writing task self-efficacy of middle-and low-proficiency students,and the writing skill self-efficacy of high-proficiency students but has no positive effects on the writing task self-efficacy of high-proficiency students.This study not only enriches the research on peer feedback and writing self-efficacy but also improves English teachers’ understanding of peer feedback and its value.Meantime,it provides feasible operational plans and teaching inspiration for English teachers to apply peer feedback to improve SHS students’ English writing self-efficacy correctly.