Effects Of Teacher Feedback And Peer Feedback On College Students' English Writing

Writing is one of four basic skills in second language learning. It is widely acknowledged that the improvement of writing ability leads to better performance of the other basic skills. In writing instruction, feedback plays a central role in cultivation of learners'writing development. Studies investigating the effects of L2 written feedback on compositions have proved that feedback could facilitate the development of the learners'L2 competence. Feedback draws learners'attention to the error made, leading to grammatical accuracy of the errors in subsequent production. However, there is a lack in empirical studies on the combination of teacher and peer feedback in writing classroom. In view of the poor performance in writing test, the thesis tries to explore the most effective way to provide feedback in the educational context, thus giving constructive suggestions in the writing teaching.Based on the theories of socioconstructivist perspective, noticing hypothesis, collaborative learning and process approach, this thesis attempts to explore the attitudes of Chinese college students towards teacher feedback and peer feedback by conducting a questionnaire survey. The comparative experiment was also conducted to investigate how teacher feedback and peer feedback affect students'revisions and whether the combination of teacher and peer feedback is better than other patterns in terms of the improvement it brings about in student writing.Four groups of English learners with a total of 133 freshmen from Chengdu University of Technology were involved in the present study. The study is comprised of student assignments, pre-test and post-test. During the study, control group received no feedback; first group received only teacher feedback; peer feedback was provided to second group; third group received both peer and teacher feedback all together. The data were collected and analyzed in order to explore the effects of different feedback patterns. Quantitative analysis was employed in the study with the aim of comparing the results from different groups.The major findings of the study are: 1) The students hold positive attitude towards both teacher feedback and peer feedback. The questionnaire indicates that the provision of teacher feedback and peer feedback has beneficial effects on subsequent written production; 2) More teacher feedback is incorporated than peer feedback. During the revision process, teacher feedback resulted in more revisions to the students'drafts than peer feedback. The students were more likely to use teacher feedback than peer feedback when revising their writing; 3) Three experimental groups performed better than control group and had significant effects in improving writing. And the combination of teacher and peer feedback is the most effective pattern in the instruction of writing, which could improve the students'writing skill substantially.Owing to the effectiveness of the mixed feedback in the improvement of writing proficiency, this pattern could be properly applied in the writing instruction so as to enhance the teaching effect and efficacy. In the future teaching of English writing, the provision of feedback can follow the mixed pattern, by which the students not only get practice during the peer review session, but the teacher can further understand the students'opinions and provide feedback more effectively. In addition, the multiple-drafts could be applied as a complement to encourage the students to be engaged in the revising activities with interests.