A Study Of The Effect Of Optimized Peer Feedback On Non-English Majors' English Writing

The present study was to test the effect of optimized peer feedback as a complement of teacher feedback in a non-English majors'English writing class where English was taught as foreign language. The author intended to explore the use of optimized peer feedback in English writing class.50 freshmen from Marketing Department of a University were chosen as the subjects. The 25 students in experimental group (EG) received the training of optimized peer feedback before writing, then they wrote the first draft in the class and sent the drafts to their peers to hold a peer discussion and got the revision suggestions, the results of which was written on the sheet of peer feedback. Then they revised their drafts according the suggestions provided by their peers and wrote the second draft, which was sent to the teacher to revise. Finally they revised their drafts according to the teacher's suggestions and wrote the final drafts. The control group (CG) received the normal method of English writing and revision. That is, the teacher gave the general revision suggestions on their first drafts, and then students revised their drafts; the teacher commented on the second drafts and student revised them until the final drafts were done. The experiment lasted one semester with four writing periods and each writing period lasted three weeks.The author, who was also the teacher of the two classes, took part in the whole process of English writing activity of this study. A questionnaire was distributed to the experimental group to investigate the student's attitude towards optimized peer feedback after the fourth writing activity finished. With the help of SPSS 15.0, the analysis of results of the questionnaire shows that most of students hold positive attitude toward the optimized peer feedback activity. Through analysis of the final products of the first, second and fourth writing period by SPSS, there is no statistical difference between the EG's and CG's scores. Through corpus-based study in terms of grammatical mistakes on the first and second draft of the last two writing circles of EG, it shows the grammatical mistakes reduces greatly. The author suggested that optimized peer feedback be adapted to the teaching of English writing to improve students'writing ability and reduce teachers'heavy burden of correcting students'compositions.