| As an important language skill, writing can comprehensively present the learners’language proficiency compared with other basic skills such as listening, speaking, and reading.Therefore, much attention should be paid to the teaching and learning of English writing.However, at present time, our college English writing teaching seems unsatisfactory, forteachers spend a lot of time and energy reading and correcting students’ compositions with alower efficiency; at the same time; it takes students much time to write and the results are not sogood. To a certain extent, this current situation can be traced back to the prevailing traditionalproduct-oriented approach in English writing teaching, assuming writing as a linear process, inwhich there is no students’ interaction within writing activities. On the contrary, theprocess-oriented approach assumes writing as a cognitive process; with students activelyparticipate in writing activities. Feedback, an indispensable part of process-oriented approach ofwriting, has drawn great attention, which encompasses teacher feedback and peer feedback. InESL context, many studies on the effects of two types of feedback have been done.Nevertheless, the results of them varied greatly in these studies. Some researchers held theopinion that teacher feedback is more favorable in the writing class while others prefer to usepeer feedback. Up to now, most of the researches just focus on either teacher feedback or peerfeedback, and few researches have combined the two kinds of feedback in the context of theEnglish teaching in vocational colleges. In recent years, teacher feedback and peer feedbackhave been applied in the university. However, few relevant researches have been conducted inChina’s vocational colleges. So the author attempts to apply teacher feedback and peer feedbackinto English writing teaching and its feasibility and effectiveness will be approved through anempirical study. The research questions are as follows:1) Which feedback will enhance thestudents’ writing proficiency, teacher feedback or peer feedback and are there any differencesabout the effects on different language aspects produced by these two kinds of feedback?2)Which feedback will more effectively inspire the students’ interest in English learning andwriting, teacher feedback or peer feedback?In order to answer these two research questions, the author chooses two proximate-levelnatural classes in Jinan Nursing Vocational College, one as the control class, and the other asthe experimental class. The experiment lasts14weeks, and during the14-week of Englishwriting teaching, each student writes four compositions. In control class students receive thetraditional teacher feedback and are required to hand in their compositions to the author andmake corrections based on the teacher’s comments, while students in the experimental class receive peer feedback training and assess the compositions of their peers. SPSS16.0is used toanalyze the data collected from this research, including those from the pre-test, post-test, andquestionnaires. After the teaching experiment, the post-questionnaire and the post-test arecarried out to answer two research questions and the results of them are all analyzedquantitatively and qualitatively.The findings of the teaching experiment are:1) The application of teacher and peerfeedback into writing can effectively enhance students’ writing competence. Compared toteacher feedback, peer feedback is more effective in improving students’ vocabulary andgrammar. But teacher feedback is particularly efficient in correcting students’ form andorigination.2) Teacher feedback and peer feedback both have a significant and positiveinfluence on students’ interest in English learning and writing, but peer feedback has betterefficiency. Although the research has produced some positive results, it has many limitations.The author at last proposes the implications and suggestions for future study. |
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