A Study On The Effect Of Peer And Teacher Feedback In China's EFL Writing

In the present thesis, the author sets out to examine the effect of peer and teacher feedback in EFL writing by an empirical study. The students under the study were 67 sophomore English majors in Jiaying College in 2003 where the author works. They had been instructed by a native-speaker teacher on EFL writing with a typical process approach. The author studied how the peer feedback and teacher feedback affected their EFL writing through a questionnaire and a set of interviews.First of all, the author analyzes the major approaches to English writing introduced into China, focusing on the advantages and disadvantages of each and the use of peer and teacher feedback in each. With the attention shifted to the process-oriented approaches to EFL writing, the author further discusses the types of teacher feedback and peer feedback.Secondly, the author reports the major findings of the effect of teacher and peer feedback on English writing in the field of LI and ESL. The effect of teacher and peer feedback in LI and ESL writing varied greatly in those studies carried in different parts of the world. Some of their findings are controversial or even contradictory to each other. The author strongly believes that it is necessary to carry out a research to probe the actual effect of them in EFL writing in china's context.Thirdly, the author conducted a questionnaire and a set of interviews by replicating the research devised by Tsui and Ng (2000) with an aim to reveal the effect of teacher and peer feedback in Chinese students' EFL writing. The data collected in this empirical study was then carefully analyzed from both the qualitative and quantitative perspective. The following results were presented:(l) both peers' feedback and teacher feedback helped Chinese EFL learners to revise their compositions, with teacher feedback resulting in more revisions and being favored more by the students; (2) teacher feedback facilitated more revisions thanpeers' feedback because EFL learners still believed that feedback from the teacher is more reliable than peers' feedback, which confirmed the findings in L2 writing that ESL learners depended more on teacher comments for the revisions of their writing; (3) teacher feedback induced more revisions at macro level while peers' feedback focused more on surface changes because EFL learners did not have much confidence in giving feedback on the organization, content and coherence of the compositions, which might in turn be related to the fact that teachers are usually more concerned about grammar and idiomatic expressions in students' writing in EFL contexts; and (4) Chinese EFL student writers conceived the process approach to be a new challenge and a useful way of improving writing ability though they did not fully understand the writing process. In addition, this study found that EFL students benefited more from reading the compositions of their peers than from the peers' feedback and they avoided negative feedback due to their traditional culture. The use of their mother language in giving peer feedback also gave rise to some practical problems in EFL writing instruction.The author ends the thesis with the pedagogical implications of this study for the EFL writing teachers in China and the future studies related to this study.