Enhancing Students' Editing Skills Through Peer Editing

The writing of the paper mainly focuses on enhancing students' editing skills through peer editing by carrying out a ten-week action research. Concerning English teaching, writing has been regarded as one of the most difficult skills for improvement among all the four skills. There have also been a lot of complaints from English teachers on the difficulties of teaching writing, mainly due to students' reluctance in writing English, their lack of experience in life and poor language proficiency. On the other hand, students always complain about boring English writing class. They also lose heart after getting the compositions graded and corrected by teachers. To remedy this situation, the writer decided to conduct an action research project in her English class.Literature review suggests that peer editing can benefit students on writing, summarily, in the following aspects: providing students with an authentic audience; increasing students' motivation for writing; enabling students to receive different views on their writing; helping students learn to read critically their own writing; and assisting students in enhancing confidence in their writing.After the literature review, some interviews were carried out and one questionnaire was administered during the first week. From the results of the interviews and the questionnaire, the writer found that the students had a desire to do peer editing. The students received ten-week skills training. Meanwhile they wrote five narrative essays. Editing can be used for focusing on a topic, solidifying a rough draft, or correcting copy errors. More specifically, each student read and made comments on papers written by other class members. Through such peer editing, students got feedback from their readers, which helped them to revise their papers to be more effective. From the results of the training, it can be seen that they have made noticeable progress.The findings show peer editing is a great way to get the students more involved in the writing process. They read and comment on each other's writing and hopefully, turn in a more polished final draft as a result. They can benefit from almost every step in the editing process. This paper is just the beginning of the action research in the writer's teaching career. More research will be needed for the future teaching.