| During last two decades, a substantial amount of research has been done into the value of different kinds of feedback offered to student writers, both in L1 and increasing in L2. Studies have typically focused either on teacher's or peer feedback, or have compared both. However, the literature on students'reactions to teacher's feedback and peer feedback is scarce in FL research and in China's EFL context.For this reason, this study attempts to investigate how Chinese English majors react to teacher's feedback and peer feedback, with a focus on their preferences for different kinds of feedback and strategies they deployed to deal with feedback. The participants involved in this study were 92 English majors (sophomores and juniors) from Huazhong University of Science and Technology. In order to make the students familiar with peer feedback which is not frequently applied in Chinese classroom, there is a pre-training. The students were informed of the evaluating criteria and given a chance to revise their classmates'compositions in class. After training, a questionnaire survey was then delivered to each student. Then a follow-up semi-structured interview was conducted with five typical subjects who were selected to meet individually with the researcher on a case study basis.Data gathered from the survey were analyzed from a quantitative perspective. The aim of this part of the study was to explore students'overall reaction to teacher's feedback and peer feedback. Data generated from the semi-structured interview were analyzed on a qualitative basis. This part of the study was designed to probe the major findings obtained from the quantitative study.The quantitative and qualitative results show that as for different kinds of feedback, the students like teacher's feedback most. Their inclination is irrelevant to their writing proficiency.Second, although most of students don't think their classmates can comment on their compositions fairly, a majority of students hold positive views that peer feedback can make the students know their strengths and weaknesses, encourage collaborative learning and provide a learning environment to improve language skills in writing. In the process of peer feedback, students figure out that classmates can correct their mistakes about surface structure, such as mechanics, vocabulary and grammar. As for content and organization, the students are suspicious of their peer's ability.Third, most of the students deem that the teacher can point out and rectify mistakes in surface level. But the students think their teacher seldom point out the inappropriate places about content and organization. In this study, we find out that some students have difficulties in understanding their teacher's comment and although the teacher has pointed out the inappropriate places in their composition, he/she hasn't provided specific methods to revise them.Finally, no matter who is the mender, teacher or peer, students don't take the comment very seriously. But when they read the composition revised by the teacher or the student, they pay more attention to mistakes of mechanics, vocabulary and grammar pointed out by the teacher or the student than to inappropriateness in content and organization. It is obvious that the students rarely apply social strategies. They usually adopt metacognitive and cognitive strategies to revise the compositionsIn light of the findings, it is recommended that it be worthwhile to apply peer feedback to revising process, especially the students given successful training for peer feedback and teachers should vary their types of feedback according to students'ability and preferences. Peer feedback and teacher's feedback discussed in this study each have their advantages and possible drawbacks. In due course, teacher's feedback and peer feedback should be combined. |
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