An Empirical Study On Peer Feedback In Non-English Majors’ English Writing Instruction

Writing is a kind of communicating ability of expressing ideas or conveyinginformation in written form. The final purpose of English writing instruction is toimprove students’ language using ability. In recent years, writing is gradually beingpaid more and more attention, but the students’ writing level is not satisfying. Manyscholars abroad or in China have done researches on English writing boththeoretically and empirically. Process writing was put forward based on theirinnovations. It takes writing as a social interacting event, focusing on excavating andexpressing of the contents in one’s mind and emphasizing the functions of revisingrepeatedly (Xu Haihong,2007). It shows that the students’ writing should be agradual modifying and improving process. Interaction among students, between theteacher and students should be paid attention to. It also claims the whole writingprocess should go on step by step. Enough time should be given before writing,while writing and after writing. Compared with the traditional product-writingmethod, process-writing method has already gotten some effectiveness, but stillneeds innovative expansion. Besides, process teaching method introduces feedbackinto writing teaching. Currently, in Chinese college English teaching, teacherfeedback is commonly used. However, this kind of feedback is limited to a range ofsomewhat corrective feedback which is only directed at the superficial mistakes.Therefore, it is difficult to get an obviously good and real effect in the improvementof students’ writing level, and it may even cause an emergence of languagefossilization.Peer feedback is an activity in the revising stage of writing in which studentsreceive feedback about their writing from other students—their peers. Typically,students work in pairs or small groups, read each other’s compositions and askquestions or give comments or suggestions. The writer of this thesis found through surveys that there are only a few researches on peer feedback in China, and most areconfined to introductions about theories or methods abroad or limited to Englishmajors. In view of this, the author of this thesis implemented an empirical study ofpeer feedback in non-English majors’ English writing instruction.The study mainly answers four questions.(1) Whether the students approve ofthe effectiveness of peer feedback mechanism? If yes, how?(2) Whether the peerfeedback mechanism affects students’ writing process? If yes, how?(3) Whether thepeer feedback mechanism helps to improve students’ writing ability, or overcometheir shyness and lower their anxiety so as to enhance their self-reliance andconfidence?(4) Whether there are some aspects of language which students payspecial attention to during peer feedback or improve most after peer feedback? If yes,what are they? And why?Directed by the Process Writing Theory, Cooperative Learning Theory, and Zoneof Proximal Development and Interactive Theory, the study chose87non-Englishmajor freshmen who are studying in an intermediate level class of Shenyang NormalUniversity. Some instruments including questionnaire, writing test and interviewwere used. The experiment lasted for15weeks. First of all, the teacher gave awell-designed training to the students in the experiment group. Next, the studentswere asked to take eight steps to make fully use of peer feedback. The eight stepsinclude brainstorming, oral discussion, writing independently, feedback in group,feedback among different groups, modifying and polishing, teacher revision,growing-up portfolio. After qualitative and quantitative analysis, the results showedthat most of the students hold positive attitudes towards peer feedback. They thinkthis activity is effective. It is of great help in the aspect of grammar, vocabulary, andmechanics. Their writing proficiency has been improved. Besides, based on theconclusions of this research, the thesis provides some pedagogical implications forcollege English writing instruction. Meanwhile, some suggestions for further studyare given to compensate for the limitations of the thesis.