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The Effectiveness Of Teacher Plus Peer Feedback For Improvement In Accuracy Of Secondary Students' English Writing

Posted on:2009-05-30Degree:MasterType:Thesis
Country:ChinaCandidate:H H SuFull Text:PDF
GTID:2167360245459370Subject:Curriculum and pedagogy
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English writing is an important and difficult part in English language teaching. In the English exam of National Matriculation Test (NMET), writing is a necessary part. In scoring the paper of NMET, one of the two important measures for the holistic quality of a piece of writing is linguistic accuracy. However, linguistic accuracy can not be improved in a short time though it takes a great deal of time and energy of teachers and students. Similar mistakes occur repeatedly. Therefore, it is necessary to explore effective ways to correct errors in order to improve the accuracy of the secondary students'writing, and to avoid error fossilization.A good number of studies by researchers abroad demonstrated that the accuracy and holistic quality of writing can be improved by various patterns of feedback. However, some researchers also claim that feedback is ineffective and even harmful to the improvement of the quality of writing. Therefore, whether feedback is effective or not is still a controversy and an open question. In China, there are few studies in this field. According to some second language acquisition theories, interaction can facilitate language acquisition and development. Thus, based on Vygotsky's zone of proximal development, Long's interactionist hypothesis and Slavin's cooperative learning theory, this thesis aims to explore the effectiveness of teacher plus peer feedback, during which there is interaction between the teacher and students and between students, for the improvement in linguistic accuracy. More specifically, it attempts to answer the following questions: 1) What are the students'attitudes towards teacher feedback and peer feedback on errors? 2) Is feedback effective in improving the accuracy of students'writing? 3) Is teacher plus peer feedback more effective than teacher feedback alone? 4) Is teacher plus peer feedback effective on the fluency of writing?In order to avoid the influence by different teachers'different teaching styles in the study, the participants were selected from three classes taught by the same English teacher. The three classes were randomly divided into three groups, i.e., the teacher plus peer feedback group, the teacher feedback group and none feedback group. Before the experiment, the author explained and stressed the importance and feasibility of peer feedback and review, then trained the students to provide feedback to each other. During the experiment, the students from the teacher plus peer feedback group participated in the peer response session to discuss the problems they had in three-student groups and then they made revisions based on the peer feedback before handing in the writing for teacher feedback. After the teacher feedback, they were required to make another revision and hand in their writing once more. The teacher feedback group made revisions after teacher feedback and then handed in the revised draft before scoring. The non feedback group just revised their drafts by themselves in given time without any feedback. The data collected were analyzed by SPSS 11.5.The results indicate that the secondary students had positive attitude towards teacher and peer feedback. Feedback is effective on improving the accuracy of writing. Teacher plus peer feedback is more effective than teacher feedback. To be more specific, it is effective on the improvement of writing fluency.The experiment has validated a method that can strengthen the effectiveness of secondary English writing training to some degree and sheds light on later research on English writing feedback. Due to the constraint of time and other factors, the experiment has its limitations and leaves some issues for further exploration.
Keywords/Search Tags:feedback, teacher plus peer feedback, English writing, accuracy, fluency
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