A Survey On The Impact Of Peer Feedback On College Students' EFL Writing

Along with the establishment of the leading position of process approach in English writing teaching, feedback on writing becomes the academic focus of instructional research. Feedback on writing mainly consists of teacher feedback and peer feedback. The effect of the former has been widely recognized in EFL writing teaching. While it is controversial whether the later can be effectively applied for EFL writing teaching. Some researchers advocate the application of peer feedback, while some urge that there are drawbacks for EFL learners. This thesis focuses on the EFL classroom, aiming to explore the impact of peer feedback on Chinese non-English majors'writing and provide evidence for the application of peer feedback in college English writing. This survey tends to solve the following problems:1. What are the students'attitudes towards peer feedback in EFL writing? Are there any differences between their former attitudes and attitudes after adopting peer feedback?2: What're the main problems students have when editing peer's writing?3: In what aspects will the students improve after the training and experiment of peer feedback?The subjects of the study are 48 sophomore undergraduate of two classes in the A level classes of the School of Civil Engineering in Hunan University, who have experienced a semester-long peer feedback in EFL writing. The instruments of the study are questionnaire and student's writings. Before the application of peer feedback, the English teacher of these two classes trained the students about how to give feedback. In that semester, peer feedback was implemented eight times and the topics of the writing were based on the subject of each unit in New Era Interactive English Book 3. The researcher handed out the questionnaires at the end of the semester. Quantitative and qualitative analysis were combined to analyze the data from questionnaire and students'writings. SPSS 17.0 was used to analyze the data.After the statistic collection and analysis, the following conclusion was drawn:First, students hold positive attitudes towards peer feedback after the application of it, which are different from their negative attitudes before peer feedback.Second, students have problems to review structure and content errors, for structure and content are their weak points in writing.Third, students have improvement in terms of writing ability, especially in structure and content, sense of audience and mutual trust.Fourth, specific feedback with a potential solution or face to face conference between the reviewer and the writer or teachers'timely instruction can be done to improve peer feed back when necessary.