An Experimental Study Of Nurse Review And Peer Review Of Senior Middle School Students' English Writing

Writing ability, which is most important in English use is considered a symbol for students' improvement in English. For quite a long time, English teachers have been perplexed at how to conduct the teaching of English writing effectively. To ask the students to complete a writing task in a fixed time and then to hand it in for the teachers to evaluate is one traditional teaching model. In this way, most students become very passive and inactive in writing. Meanwhile, teachers are overworked, and they become buried in the work of evaluating the detailed mistakes in great piles of students' works. In view of this situation, many linguists and teachers have done much research on the way to review students' writing works. Some believed that teachers' detailed review (nurse review)(NR) was necessary. Only through teacher review (NR), can teachers get a good idea of the problems existing in the students' works, and give them some instruction, aiming at the mistakes that students have made. However, most researchers believed that peer review (PR) could make students more active and make more growth in writing. This point was widely accepted, but it was mainly from theory and experience, without the support of experimentation. Based on this situation, the author carried out an experiment, reviewing students' English writing. The author put forward this hypotheses, as follows: PR can be more successful than NR in helping EFL students at senior middle school cultivate a spirit of cooperation, develop initiative in writing and finally to make improvement in writing. The significance of this thesis lies in its first experimental study on the two approaches towards students' writing. In the thesis, the author compared NR and PR, and through the data of the experiment and post-experiment questionnaire responses, answered the hypotheses. At the same time, the author gave some suggestions on the teaching of English writing.Besides the introduction and the ending, the thesis is made up of five chapters.In the first chapter, the author introduced the relevant research and research background in pointing out the significance of the present study, as he made a brief survey of the relevant research on reviewing of writing at home and abroadIn Chapter Two, the theoretical foundation was introduced. The theories consist of the cooperation learning theory, the theory of zone of proximal development and error analysis. The hypothesis and the implementation of the treatment of the study were based on the above theories.In the third chapter, the author introduced the purposes, the subjects, the hypotheses of the experiment, as well as the instruments used in the experiment. It follows that the purpose of this thesis was to study the relationship between the competence of students writing and the two methods of reviewing, as well as to obtain experimental material to serve as a guide for future teaching. The subjects were students from two classes (Class 1 and Class 2) in Grade Two in a key senior middle school, where the author worked. This experiment lasted for one year, from August, 2005 to July, 2006. The author, English teacher of the two classes, was the researcher conducting this experiment. Class One was assigned as the experimental/treatment class, in which NR was conducted, while Class Two was the control class, where the author kept the traditional teaching method——NR. The author stated the hypotheses that PR is more successful than NR in helping EFL students at senior middle school to cultivate a spirit of cooperation, to develop initiative in writing and finally to make improvement in their writing. The instruments used in the pretest and the posttest were two (2) writing items from NMET. And, to obtain more detailed information, a questionnaire for the subjects was designed, as well.In Chapter Four, the author focused on the implementation of the treatment of the study. The procedure of the experiment was introduced in detail including the details of the pretest, posttest and the course of treatment as well as a questionnaire.Chapter Five dealt with the collection of data and data analysis. After analysis of the data of the experiment and the questionnaire responses, a conclusion was drawn that PR has more advantages than NR as it can help students make more progress in writing, which answered the hypotheses. Meanwhile, the author analyzed the limitations of the experiment, and proposed some suggestions on the future teaching of writing.