An Empirical Study On Peer Feedback Effect Of Chinese Non-English Majors' English Writing Teaching

Combining the advantages of the product approach, the process approach and the genre approach, the process genre approach highlights the guidance function of the genre, emphasizes the significance of the social contexts and pursues the enhancement and improvement of learners'communicative capacity in the English writing teaching procedure.As a phase in the process genre approach, peer feedback, integrating with the teacher feedback, could effectively help to improve the learners'English writing capacity, enhance their confidence, foster their awareness of communication, and create an active and harmonious writing environment.This paper employs the process genre approach as the teaching guide and takes a natural class of freshmen in an independent college of third batch of undergraduate as the research subjects. The writing teaching, emphasizing the significance of peer feedback, aims at cultivating of their awareness of the genre and communication, raising the acceptance of peer feedback by teacher's giving positive comments on peer feedback, facilitating students'confidence in themselves and their partners, encouraging students to participate in the writing class activities and finally improving students'English writing capacity.Through a semester's experiment, observation and analyses of collected data and materials, the writer draws the conclusions as follows:1) Through the comparison with the pre-test and post-test writing of the control group and the experiment group, both of which employ process genre approach as the teaching guide, students in the latter one which emphasizes the important role of peer feedback obtain apparent improvement. The result verifies that as a phase in the process genre approach, peer feedback is very significant and useful in the improvement of the students'writing capacity;2) The positive comments on peer feedback from the teacher could affect the acceptance of peer feedback and facilitate the raise of the acceptance.In addition, the questionnaire survey and the semi-structured interview witness students'strong desire for the learning autonomy yet insufficient attention to the awareness of the genre and communication. This enlightens the educators to respect students'learning autonomy and then deploy their learning initiative in the teaching procedure. In order to help learners form solid awareness of communication and genre, educators had better employ peer feedback and the process genre approach as early as possible. Considering the applicable arrangement of this teaching approach and better teaching effect, the author suggests proceeding this approach in colleges where students own comparatively lower English writing proficiency and poorer English foundation or the slow level classes in the colleges which employ the English grading teaching method.