Peer Assessment Of College Students In Chinese EFL Writing

In recent years, many foreign teachers and scholars began to study peer feedback, and they attempt to consider it as the supplement for a teacher to correct composition, but in China few people have done related empirical researches in this area. Peer feedback activity in writing class, which is commonly used as an additional method to teacher’s feedback, is frequently recommended by a great many researchers and teachers abroad. However in China, we could only find few empirical studies in this area of research. Most of the previous researches are about peer review in ESL context or peer review of English-majors in the EFL context. However, this paper tries to study peer review of non-English-majors in the Chinese context. It aims to examine whether students can give their peers constructive comments after training, whether students are able to modify their compositions based on their peers’ comments, and, whether students’ attitudes towards peer review have changed or not. It also explores the roles played by peer review in stimulating students to make revisions in their writings.The aim of this study is to examine a group of participants’ writing experiences in terms of peer feedback in Wenhua College, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, with a purpose of demonstrating and understanding their attitudes towards peer feedback activity, their concerns in peer feedback activity, and also with the effects on their writing and their beliefs of writing. This article uses the qualitative study method to collect and analyze the statistics and data from the participants’writings and also uses an informal interview after the activity to help analyze the answers from the questionnaire.According to the results of the data analysis, the author has drawn the following conclusions:(1) generally speaking, the students have positive perceptions of peer review. Most of them feel that it has mutual contributions. Through peer review, students can get more ideas and information from peers and improve the organization of their compositions;(2) After proper training, students can make effective comments and they would incorporate some of them into revisions of their own writing;(3) Reading and commenting on peers’writing may make students become critical readers of others’ writing and more critical readers and revisers of their own writing. Peer review helps them to spot their own weaknesses in their writing, and raises the students’ awareness of strengths and weaknesses of their compositions;On the basis of the above findings, the researcher made some advices and pieces of suggestions in order to help improve the teaching methods of college English writing.