| Though writing is very important in developing the students' comprehensive ability in English, the instruction of writing is still far from effective. In the result of the College English Test Band 4 (CET-4), students have made great achievements in their proficiency in reading and listening, but the improvement in writing is rather frustrating.Teachers and researchers have been doing various experiments on how to improve the students' writing ability. Nowadays when process approach to writing has become increasingly popular, feedback, an indispensable part of this approach, has drawn more and more attention from both teachers and researchers. Many studies have been conducted to show the influence of peer feedback in affecting students' proficiency in writing. Among them, some research findings are quite contradictory.This study attempts to evaluate the effect of peer feedback on college students' writing. To be more exact, the following questions are to be addressed in the study.This study aims to answer the following research questions:(1) What is the performance of the participants in writing, as a result of peer feedback and teacher feedback?(2) Compared with teacher's feedback, is peer feedback more profitable to students in English writing in helping them to achieve a higher score?(3) What is the students' attitude towards peer feedback and teachers' feedback?On the basis of previous studies on peer feedback, the thesis designs an experimental study and a questionnaire for the purpose of providing answers to the above questions.The participants in this study, 101 students from two classes in their third semester in Hubei Institute of Education were divided into two groups: the experimental group and the control group.During the 16 weeks' training sessions, each participant wrote four compositions in class. The control group received teacher's written feedback and was required to make specific corrections outside the class, as was done in the traditional practices. In contrast to the students in the control group, those in the experimental group received peer feedback mainly in written forms through two peer review sessions, which were conducted in small groups of three students. Accordingly, the students in the experimental group were required to write additional two drafts for each topic according to the feedback from their peers. In order to exclude the possible interferences of the language proficiency on the result of experiment, the author compared the scores in the final examination in the second semester and found there was no significant difference between the two groups. At the same time, the comparison on the pre-test showed there was no significant difference between the experimental group and the control group. After the training, a post-test was held among the 101 students. Meanwhile, a questionnaire, the content of which covered "trouble with English writing", "the effect of teacher's written feedback in participants' former writing instruction", "the usefulness of reading peer's writings" and "the usefulness of peers' feedback", was conducted among the 51 students in the experimental group. All the data were analyzed with the help of SPSS 12.0.The study shows that peer feedback has played an important role in facilitating college students' writing proficiency. Peer feedback results in a higher score in the writing test. And it can reduce the gap between the students and help them make improvement as a whole. Furthermore, peer feedback is helpful in increasing a sense of audience and of the owner, and in boosting students' interest in writing. With the instruction of teacher's feedback, the students can also make great improvement in raising their scores. Though the students can all get improved through teacher's feedback, the gap between them seems to remain unchanged.Therefore, owing to its effectiveness in the improvement of writing proficiency, peer feedback could be properly applied in the writing instruction so as to relieve teachers of the huge burden of massive reading. In addition, peer feedback and teachers' feedback could be applied complementarily in order to further improve students' writing proficiency.
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