Exploring An Effective Approach Of Feedback In EFL Writing: An Empirical Study

The importance of writing in developing the students' comprehensive ability in English is commonly recognized. However, there are some heated debates about who should give feedback and how to give feedback in the field of EFL writing in China.This study is undertaken during a 16-week semester to investigate the effects of teacher feedback and peer feedback respectively in improving accuracy, fluency and complexity of Chinese college EFL learners' writing and explore an effective approach of feedback in improving accuracy, fluency and complexity of Chinese EFL learners' writing.Effectiveness of feedback was investigated through a comparison of two groups with: (1) the experimental group which received semester-long peer feedback which included a process of peer feedback training, receiving peer feedback on content and grammar of students' writing, making revisions referring to feedback on content and grammar from peers successively and receiving scores and comments on their final drafts from the teacher, and (2) the control group which received teacher feedback that included scoring, indirect error feedback and comments on content and organization, and then made revisions referring to teacher feedback.Analysis of the data indicates that students of these two groups have experienced improvement in both writing quality assessed by holistic scoring, analytic scoring and their accuracy, fluency, and complexity in writing scaled by objective measures. Apart from quantitative measures, questionnaire was also employed to gather information on the students' view and insights on the feedback they received over the semester.The major findings are: (1) feedback does play a very important role in Chinese EFL students' writing since both of these two groups have shown a significant improvement in the fluency, accuracy, and complexity in students' subsequent writing; (2) peer feedback in this study outperforms teacher feedback in the fluency, accuracy, and complexity referring to holistic scoring, analytic scoring and objective measures to some certain degree. Analyses of questionnaire data indicate that the majority of the students in the control group value teacher feedback and the majority of the students in the experimental group consider peer feedback as a new and effective approach to improve their subsequent writing.Therefore, the author puts forward that peer feedback can be used as an effective alternative in teaching EFL writing in China owing to its effectiveness in the improvement of accuracy, fluency and complexity of Chinese EFL learners' writing.