A Study On The Effectiveness Of Peer Feedback On Improving English Writing Ability Of Senior High School Students

English writing, one of four basic skills, plays an important role in senior high school English teaching. Recently, how to improve students’writing abilities had become a hot research topic in the area of English writing teaching. In order to prove the effectiveness of peer feedback in high school English writing classes, three research questions are addressed:what are students’attitudes towards peer feedback? What are the effects of peer feedback on students’English writing? And what do students focus on when giving and receiving peer feedback?Both quantitative and qualitative research methods are involved in this research. Participants are two classes of students in one senior high school in Kunshan. They are randomly assigned to experimental group and control group. Students in the experimental group need to receive feedback training, do both pre and post questionnaires and attend the peer feedback session by discussing compositions with their peers, whereas the other group just needs to attend the writing classes as usual. Meanwhile, ten students in the experimental group are chosen at random to attend an interview according to their writing levels at the end of the study. This study lasts two months.The major findings of the study are summarized as follows:1. Most of students hold positive attitude towards peer feedback, not only the attitude towards the activity itself, but also their peers’ evaluation abilities.2. Peer feedback has a great impact on senior high school students’ English writing. Four aspects are included:students’composition qualities; the benefits from reading and revising peers’compositions; peers’advice on students’composition and the improvement of revision ability.3. The participants’feedback has the feature of centralization. For instance, in the content part, they basically focus on whether the key point is missing and whether the writers’own views are clear.In addition, three main pedagogical implications can be derived from the results of the present study. The first one is the renewal of the teaching notions. Secondly, the application of peer feedback in common English writing. The last one is the combination of peer feedback and teacher feedback. Due to some limitations of this study, there are some suggestions for future research:more participants at different levels, a longer time span and more reasonable grouping.