A Study Of The Application Of Peer Feedback In Teaching Of High School English Writing

As one of the most important human communication tools, writing can effectivelyaccelerate language acquisition. Feedback, which is the essential part of process writingapproach, has become a principal research subject in writing teaching. Feedback often involvestwo aspects: teacher feedback and peer feedback. In recent years, both scholars at home andabroad have done a great deal of researches on feedback. Most students accept teacher feedback,while there are still disputes on the effect of peer feedback. Most of the experimental studiesabroad on peer feedback have been conducted in ESL context, while in China, most of thosestudies select subjects from colleges and universities. Few researches and studies are conductedamong high school students. Therefore, under the guidance of the related theories andexperimental findings, this study tries to apply peer feedback into high school English writingteaching to replace part of teacher feedback, aiming at arousing writing interest, promotingwriting and obtaining a better teaching effect. It is expected to offer some references on how touse peer feedback to high school teachers. The research questions are as follows:1) what attitudedoes the high school students take towards peer feedback?2) Are high school students able toprovide helpful and efficient suggestions on writing?3) Can peer feedback improve the writingability of high school students?In order to find out the answers to the above questions, this study compares the scores ofpretest and posttest between the experimental class students and the control class students. Italso analyzes the rationality and utilization of the feedback suggestions in the last writings ofeighteen students of the experimental class to study the capability of high school students inoffering suggestions, and collects the information about students’ attitude towards peer feedbackmethods by means of questionnaires and interviews. After a sixteen-week study, the authorfinally comes to the conclusion with the aid of quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis:1)Most of the students in experimental class accept peer feedback. They take interest in reading,discussing about their classmates’ writings and giving feedback.2) High school students arecapable of giving advice on English writing. By reading the compositions, the author finds that80percent of peer feedback suggestions are advisable and70percent of them are accepted inrevision.3) Both the two classes improve their performances in writing, but the control classwhere teacher feedback is applied makes a bigger progress, but there was no significantdifference and the gap between the students in experimental class is narrowed, while it remainsthe same in control class. Based on the conclusions above, the author holds that it is beneficialto apply peer feedback in high school English writing teaching.