Application Of Online Peer Feedback In The Teaching Of College English Writing

Appropriate and effective feedback in writing teaching can not only lessen the teachers’workload and improve the teaching quality, but also stimulate the students’ interests in writing.Furthermore, it helps to improve the students’ classroom involvement and develop theircommunicative abilities. However, under the current college English teaching model in China,the paper feedback from teachers is not only time-consuming and ineffective but also contrary toits expected results in the English writing class.Since the1990’s, the online peer feedback has drawn more and more attentions in theeducational world and has become an important research focus for scholars and languageteachers at home and abroad. However, due to the late start of peer feedback studies in ourcountry, most articles are confined to introducing the effect of the peer feedback or exploring thedifferences between the teacher feedback and the peer feedback in English teaching. Fewempirical studies have been made so far. Even fewer researches are done on the part of onlinepeer feedback.In this thesis, the research questions are to be addressed through the comparison betweenthe online peer feedback and teacher feedback: firstly, does the online peer feedback improveChinese college students’ English writing performance? Secondly, how can the online peerfeedback improve Chinese college students’ English writing performance?Therefore, the experiment consisting of16weeks was eventually carried out in LinyiUniversity in the last half of2011. Two groups of this university were selected as theexperimental group adopting online peer feedback and the control group adopting the traditionalteacher feedback. Such instruments as questionnaire and pre-test, post-test, and follow-upinterview were adopted in the teaching experiment, and the data collected from the experimentwere carefully computed and analyzed through SPSS. The conclusion was made on the basis ofqualitative and quantitative research methods.The results show that: first, the online peer feedback can improve more students’ writingperformance to a certain degree, compared with the teacher feedback, because of the relaxedstudy community offered by the internet. Second, through the online peer feedback, students’writing interests have been motivated and the class involvement to give feedback have been improved, which have lead to a good performance in the English writing, even though theirfeedback only focus on the revision with the surface changes as well as the positive commentswith much affirmation. Beside, it also shows that Chinese college students have positive attitudetowards the online peer feedback, which, however, can not be the substitute for the teacherfeedback still playing the authority role.All in all, it’s found that the approach of the online peer feedback in college students’writing is the effective way to improve writing performance currently. To be frank, however, dueto the restraint of current conditions and the author’s capability, the research has inevitably somelimitations, e.g. the period for the experiment was relatively short; the processing and analysis ofdata was not enough in depth. Great efforts have to be taken to explore these issues later on.