A Study On The Effectiveness Of Peer Feedback In College English Writing

English writing ability is very important among all the four abilities of learners. And it is very important in developing the students'comprehensive ability in English. However, in the (English as a Foreign Language) EFL context, error correction is always something that baffles most of the college English teachers because of the large class size. Literature review indicates that peer feedback can be an alternative way to teacher correction. This study attempts to investigate the feasibility and the effectiveness of peer feedback of non-English majors. Besides, the study also considers an often-cited suggestion for successful peer feedback-trained peer feedback. It aims to explore effectiveness of trained peer feedback in the way of model feedback and to better utilise the effectiveness of peer feedback.The subjects participated in the experiment were all non-English majors from Dalian Ocean University. They were divided into two groups. Experimental Group (EG) is comprised of 105 sophomore students. And Control Group (CG) consists of 106 sophomore students. The EG was trained in how to participate in peer feedback to writing and the CG adopted the traditional English writing instructions during the 16-week sessions. Both groups practiced in their writing tasks. Quantitative and qualitative analyses were performed in the study. The research instruments include the questionnaire, test, drafts tasks and interview.Results of the investigation indicate that trained peer feedback improved students peer feedback abilities and attitudes, both of which will have a beneficial effect on their writing and English learning in the long run. In addition, students welcome peer feedback as a new instructional method of writing.As peer feedback had positive influence on the improvement of students'writing proficiency, peer feedback and teacher feedback could be applied complementarily in order to further improve students'writing interests.