Peer Response In College English Writing Class

In the last few decades, with the prevalence of the communicative approach, the focus of teaching has started to shift from grammar and translation to listening and speaking. Under the traditional approach, many students are turned out to be "mute" or "deaf in English. The implementation of the new approach has helped a lot in improving students' ability in listening, speaking, reading and writing. However, compared to the former three skills, writing is the least improved. This is especially true for non-English majors. In their writings, teachers can often see Chinglish, inadequate content, lack of coherence, etc. What leads to the current situation of college English writing?First, writing instruction for non-English majors is far from satisfactory. For one thing, no special time is planned for writing in the course schedule; for another, the class time designated for English learning is too limited. Most teachers have no time to deal with writing. Let alone offer students systematic training of writing skills. Students are simply given a topic to write either in class or out of class. After finishing their first writing draft, few students do self-revision work, needless to say negotiating with peers and getting peer feedback. They directly hand in their writing to the teacher for correction. Their first writing becomes the final product and the composition process is linear. Under such circumstance, students unconsciously develop a habit of writing just for completing a task. They lack intrinsic motivation for writing. How can they improve their writing ability? Second, due to the large class, English teachers in China "suffer" from the "tedious and unrewarding chore" of correcting students' essays (Hyland, 1990). To put it in another way, even though English teachers consume endless time and energy in writing correction, some students repeat the same mistake endlessly. To some degree, improving students' writing is labor-intensive, time-consuming and fruitless for college English teachers.This phenomenon has aroused a widespread concern among teachers and researchers. Process writing has been advocated by many experts and researchers at home and abroad to improve students' writing quality. It includes different stages, such as brainstorming activities, outlining, drafting (focusing on meaning), revising (focusing on organization and meaning), and editing (focusing on style and grammar). Process writing is nonlinear and recursive. Peer response has been viewed as an important component of process writing. It is also consistent with modern theories of language learning, such as collaborative learning theory, Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development. In other words, peer response is helpful to stimulate students to take their peers as a kind of learning resource. They cooperate with each other, negotiate with each other, learn from each other and revise their writing over and over again. According to some research findings, peer response has not only positive effects but also negative ones on students' writing. For example, to maintain group harmony, peers may not be objective in commenting on each other's writing. On the other hand, peers may be skeptical about each other's ability in writing correction. The present study is aimed to employ peer response training to maximize the effectiveness of peer response in college English writing class, which finally leads to the improvement of students' writing.To testify the effects of trained peer response on students' writing in college English context, the researcher randomly chose one class involving 43 students from Southwest University of China for the experiment, which started from September to December 2007, lasting 16 weeks. Questionnaire, students' writing drafts and writing tests were used as instruments to collect data, which was mainly processed by means of Analytical Hierarchy Process.The result of the study indicated that trained peer response did enhance students' awareness of cooperation and did help to improve students' writing quality significantly, such as clear logic thinking, reduction of linguistic errors and more awareness of audience. Students' attitude toward writing also varied to some degree. They became autonomous in self-revision and less anxious about writing. Compared to teacher feedback, trained peer response was more focused on form and was still weak in explaining vague ideas and offering appropriate revising suggestions. Chinglish was the biggest obstacle for them. To a certain degree, peer response might be complementary to teacher feedback and partly lighten teacher's heavy load on writing correction. But to maximize the effectiveness of peer response, teachers need to hold a firm belief in it and highlight the importance of it and create a comfortable environment for it. More importantly, teachers need to instruct students to be effective peer responders and improve students' ability to revise Chinglish in particular.Due to limited time and lack of experience, there is still some room for the present research to be further discussed, such as increasing the number of subjects, extending the scope of the research, enlarging the size of peer response group, and so on. All of them will lead to the change of the research result.