An Investigation Into The Implementation Of Peer Review On English Writing Of Secondary L2 Learners

Since the application of the newly promulgated Standard of English Curriculum, the process approach of writing has received more and more attention in education field. This approach includes not only teachers'comments, but also peer review. Though it is widely accepted in the West, conflicting findings have been found in researches.In China, the researches in this field are limited, especially in secondary schools. Our tradition of teaching is teacher-centered, which means only teachers have the authority to review students'compositions and students are used to it. This research studies the results of two questionnaires and two series of interviews given to 10 teachers and 50 students of the Middle School Attached to Northeast Normal University respectively, and aims to answer the following three questions:1. Do secondary L2 writers benefit from peer review?2. How do students consider peer review and teacher comments? Is there significant difference between the two attitudes?3. What are the problems while peer review is applied in secondary schools? How to avoid or solve these problems?First, a questionnaire survey was administrated to the 10 teachers to find out the real situation of peer review in the school. Two weeks after the survey, the researcher picked six teachers from them to do some interviews in order to get a comprehensive result. Then another questionnaire was given to the 50 students whose class had applied peer review most frequently. Also, some interviews were done additionally to study students'acceptance of peer review and their attitudes towards teachers'comments.The results show that peer review is not widely used in English writing of secondary L2 learners. However, this approach has some foundation in the future practice because teachers consider it useful. Meanwhile, the study also reveals that peer review still has some problems in application, including no unified standard, limited time, large student number, uneven English levels, distrust between students and mostly grammar-focused. Teachers'comments are more preferable compared to peer review because of teachers'authority. And the questionnaire also showed that students do not think that peer review is mostly focused on grammar, which conflicts teachers'opinions. The researcher analyzes the data and discusses the reasons of these problems. Suggestions are given, including a unified standard of peer review, training of peer review and treating it as the complement of teachers'comments.Based on the discussion, the research reveals that there is feasibility for peer review to be applied in English writing of secondary L2 learners. The researcher hopes that more researches can be done in this field. Although limitation exists, findings that it reports can be useful in writing teaching of secondary schools.