An Empirical Study Of Peer Revision In The Teaching Of English Writing For College English Majors

The author has made a survey of five famous universities in Shanxi Province. By makingthe survey in a small scale, the author finds out that most English teachers for English-major ornon-English major get used to the traditional writing pedagogy in English language, that is togive the assignment to the students, then later mark their homework about the spelling andgrammatical mistakes, then this assignment is finished. The bad consequence is that moststudents did not pay enough attention to the teachers' marking of the paper; they only give aquick glance of the scores, so most of the students' writing level has not been greatly improvedafter a period of time. Most of the college English teachers have either never heard of the peerrevision or never adopted it to grade the students' writing. Although the survey scale is notlarge, it can still reflect the fact of the current situation of most college English teachers: theyconduct the traditional way of marking the students' writing.Peer revision is the most common approach which is widely used in the teaching ofEnglish writing whether it is in native English-speaking country or in the country whereEnglish is used as the second language. However, in the English teaching classrooms in China,most of the English teachers are not familiar with this teaching approach. Due to the limitedtime of college English teaching and the large admission of college students in recent years,grading the students' English writing becomes a tiring and unrewarding experience for theteachers. How to enhance the students' writing proficiency in classroom teaching, especiallyfor English majors, has become the major concern for the college English teachers. This thesiswill present the author's attempts to use the peer revision as an effective teaching approach toreplace the traditional approach in order to enhance the three-year college students' writingproficiency.Based on the discussion and analysis of the effectiveness by using the peer revision on thestudents' writing proficiency, this research has conducted the pre-training of peer revision; andanalyzed the variables of the division of each team, at the same time the results of pretest andposttest is considered in order to avoid any distractions and influences of the variables. Thepresent research has involved two groups of English-major sophomore students, which wererandomly chosen by the author. For the experimental group, the students have been trained theknowledge and cultivated the awareness of peer revision, then make them know the basic requirements and the common standard of grading writing; for the control group, whichfollowed the traditional writing approach in which students are required to finish theassignment the teacher gave them and revise their essays after the homework is returned.The purpose of this research is to investigate the impact of peer revision on Englishmajors' writing proficiency. Three questions were addressed:1) Can the peer revision beadopted effectively in English writing class of three-year college English-major students inChina?2) Can the group work of peer revision influence the students' perception of writing andrevision?3) Can the students who have been involved in peer revision produce better qualitywriting than those who have not?The result of the research shows that the students' writing proficiency has been improvedto a certain degree. The students' participation in the class activities has been greatly enhanced,at the same time both the student-student and teacher-student interaction has been greatlyimproved. This interaction has obviously influenced the students' concept of writing andrevision. The students' interest has been largely enhanced, they are more and more interested inreading their peer's writing and give them the corresponding suggestions, and at the same timethey try their best to avoid the similar mistakes.The conclusion has analyzed the disadvantage and shortage of this research, which isattempting to lay a good foundation for the further research for the peer revision in collegeEnglish writing and improve the students' writing proficiency.