Peer Response And Teacher Feedback In College English Writing

Writing is one of the important skills to be mastered in foreign language study as well as an important link in foreign language teaching. However, the effect of English writing teaching in China is not satisfactory. Plenty of teachers and researchers have been constantly doing research and drawing on advanced theories overseas. Since Process Approach was introduced into writing teaching in1960s and1970s, feedback has become an important component of writing teaching. Consequently, the feedback on learners’ writing has become an important topic which has caught the attention of teachers and researchers and been widely discussed by scholars both at home and abroad. The feedback modes touched upon by various researches mainly focused on teacher feedback and peer feedback. It is quite necessary to research in which way teacher feedback and peer feedback combined will affect students’ writing proficiency.This thesis is trying to answer the following three questions:(1) What is the difference in the types of feedback between peer feedback and teacher feedback?(2) In which way can peer feedback serve as beneficial supplement to teacher feedback?(3) What are the attitudes of students towards peer feedback and teacher feedback respectively?The55students who participated in this research and specialized in non-English majors are sophomores from the same class of Chuzhou University of Anhui Province. They are studying college English in the third semester. In this study, the students finished peer feedback sheets and teacher feedback sheets during three writing tasks to find out the difference in the types of feedback between peer feedback and teacher feedback, and filled out a questionnaire to understand the attitudes of students towards peer and teacher feedback. The research tools of this experiment include questionnaire survey, peer feedback sheets, teacher feedback sheets, three writing tasks, and two tests. All the data were quantitatively analyzed by utilizing the software SPSS17.0.The major findings of this thesis are as follows:1. Peer feedback mainly pays attention to the students’ mistakes in language form, such as spelling, use of words and grammar in their writing. However, teacher feedback not only gives attention to the students’mistakes in language form, but also attaches importance to their mistakes in content and discourse. As a result, peer feedback mainly improves the students’ performance in language form aspect of their writing while the effect of teacher feedback is mainly reflected in the students’progress made in the aspect of content and discourse of their writing.2. The students are supportive of both peer feedback and teacher feedback. They are willing to accept the comments and advice from the two different kinds of feedback. But it must be noted that the students hold the view that peer feedback is more useful in the aspect of language form of writing while teacher feedback is more effective in helping them with their shortcomings in content and discourse of writing although they also think teacher feedback is useful in language form.3. The students express the opinion that teacher feedback is more authoritative than peer feedback, but the two kinds of feedback should be combined. As time is limited for the teachers, so peer feedback can be regarded as beneficial supplement to teacher feedback in terms of the aspect of language form of English writing. The integration of peer feedback with teacher feedback is conducive to improving their writing proficiency in the eyes of the students. The different performance of the students between the pretest and posttest (the students’ performance was better in the posttest) proves that peer feedback and teacher feedback combined can really help the students make progress in their writing abilities.This thesis demonstrated the effectiveness of teacher feedback and peer feedback combined in improving the writing proficiency of students specializing in non-English majors through empirical study. The conclusion provides meaningful guidance to writing teaching of non-English-major students.