Peer Feedback And Its Effects On EFL Non-English Majors' Writing

This case study aims at exploring what are students'attitudes towards peer feedback. It also uncovers whether peer feedback affects students'revisions in a multiple-draft, process- approach writing classroom and whether revision from peers improve the overall quality of composition in non-English major writing classroom.The study attempts to investigate peer feedback and its effect on EFL non-English majors'writing. The researcher examines 25 non-English major freshmen in Jiangxi Institute of Education through a questionnaire, three writing tasks, a pretest and posttest writing and interviews.In accordance with the results of data analysis, the major findings are drawn as follows: 1) as a whole, the students have a positive view on peer feedback. They believe the benefits of peer feedback either as providers or as receivers. However, students show more agreement on the benefit from peers'written comments than that from reading and revising peers'composition. 2) If the students are provided the choice of peer and teacher feedback, almost half of the students are uncertain whether correcting composition between peers was more helpful than that by teacher, while they are tending to prefer to receive both peer and teacher feedback. 3) Overall, students incorporate most peer feedback into their revision. Examining the number of peer feedback received and incorporated, it can be concluded that the subjects do pay much attention to peer feedback and think a majority of the feedback from their peers is reasonable. As far as the five language aspects of the peer feedback are concerned, the students incorporate most on vocabulary and mechanics, least on organization, which is similar to the peer feedback received. However, a slight contrast between peer feedback received and peer feedback incorporated is that the students incorporate more on mechanics than on vocabulary in their revision, whereas they receive more vocabulary than mechanics for their first drafts. 4) The students tend to obtain slight higher scores in posttest, but not significantly higher. The two-month training on incorporating peer feedback in the students'English writing promotes their writing ability slightly, but it is impossible for subjects in this research to make significant improvement in writing level, even if peer feedback is used in the process of writing teaching. The scores on five language aspects are heightened a bit in posttest, which uncovers the advantage of peer feedback to some extent. Moreover, this group of subjects makes greatest progress on mechanics and small progress in grammar and vocabulary.These findings have pedagogical implications for the non-English major writing teaching in college. This case study suggests that teacher should integrate peer feedback into EFL non-English major writing class with confidence. Besides, implementing peer feedback effectively in writing class demands teachers to plan and structure this carefully, such as guiding learners giving feedback more globally and organizing discussion in pairs on peer's composition. Last but not least, peer feedback is not a substitute for teacher feedback completely; therefore teachers should apply peer feedback, together with proper teacher feedback in EFL non-English majors'writing class.