A Study On The Feasibility Of Optimized Peer Assessment In Teaching College English Writing

One of the requirements of College English Curriculum is to improve the learners'comprehensive competence in using English. And English comprehensive competence of the learners includes not only their listening and speaking abilities, but also their reading and writing abilities. Writing ability, as one of the important indicators could reflect the college students'English competence. Therefore, in order to improve students writing skills, the teachers have devoted a great deal of efforts in the English writing, such as the teachers'laborious work in correcting and the learners'hard work in practice. However, the result is unsatisfactory. It is shown that the average scores of writing portion in CET-4 have also been around eight points during the past decades. And most of the non-English majors have shown their weak points in English writing. Some reasons can contribute to this phenomenon. For example, their English basic knowledge are very poor, and the traditional teaching and assessing method of the teachers are not so scientific that they can catch up with the development of the modern teaching objectives. In order to improve this situation, many educators and Front-line English teachers have put forward a new concept 'peer assessment' on the basis of the process teaching principle. However, due to individual discrepancy of students and their different educational backgrounds, the results are also not identical. Some researchers have proved that the use of peer assessment approach is feasible and can be used in the English writing teaching to improve the learners'writing skills. However, some other studies have stated that 'peer assessment' was questioned due to the learners mutual distrust, friendly marking and suspicion of their peers'English ability as the evaluators.But for the researches which have stated the feasibility of 'peer assessment'in teaching English writing, since most studies are lack of a theoretical basis, a reasonable experimental design or clear marking criteria, etc., they have brought about a lot of difficulties in putting it into practice. Therefore, some strategies and measures are proposed to optimize the process of peer assessment, which is called optimized peer assessment (OPA) in this thesis. And based on the theoretical framework---constructivism and the previous studies on peer assessment, the thesis aims at solving the following three questions:First, it is going to find the changes of the students'attitudes to peer assessment before and after the utilizing of the method in the process of English writing teaching. Second, it is going to find the relationship between peer assessment and teacher assessment to the learners'compositions. Third, through comparing and analyzing students'essays, it aims to find the possible improvements of the learners'compositions from employing OPA in teaching English writing.80 freshmen from school of journalism and communications, Zhengzhou University have participated in the study. The whole process of the study is from mid-February 2009 and to the late June, which lasts for 16 weeks. During the entire experimental process, the subjects are required to complete four writing assignments, where the first article as the pre-test, is assessed by teachers completely. The results would be used as the criteria to group the learners as well as the basis to compare with the post-test. Besides, all the subjects are asked to finish two questionnaires before and after the practice on their attitudes to the assessment method respectively. And by the end of the semester,32 students are demanded to accomplish an open-ended questionnaire on their attitudes and recommendations to the use of the approach in English teaching classroom. Furthermore, the improvements of the learners'compositions on each aspect in the last three writing assignments have also been studied.From collecting and analyzing the data, it is shown that:Firstly, the students have shown their positive attitudes to the use of OPA in their English writing instructions during the whole process of the experiment, although several top students have expressed relatively weak interests to it. And most of the students'attitudes have been changed slightly to the positive direction after the practice of OPA this term, and they have insisted they can benefit from these activities.Secondly, it has shown high correlation between teacher's marks and peers' marks after the practice of OPA in college English writing classroom. Especially, statistically significant correlation between them on total mark, content, organization, vocabulary, language use and mechanics have been found at the end of this semester. But in the first assignment, only total marks between the two are of relatively moderate correlations, while other aspects are of quite weak correlations. This indicates the importance of practice.Thirdly, it is found that most of the learners'compositions have been improved in the aspects of content, vocabulary, language use and mechanics generally. In addition, this method has also greatly activated the classroom atmosphere, enhanced the students'spirit of help one another and motivated their keen interests in English learning.While there are some limitations of this study, such as the shortness of experiment time, lackness of teaching experience of the teacher and littleness of the research samples etc. this study has been a success, for the assessment methods used in this study has improved the writing abilities of the students to some extent and it has been recognized by students. This study can be applied to the actual teaching of English writing to improve the non-English majors' writing proficiency. Although the assessment has been optimized on the basis of the previous studies, there are still some deficiencies in the process of the experiment have been found. Thus, some improvements have been put forward in the hope that more students could improve their writing proficiency from the approach of peer assessment in the last part.