The Influence Of Giving And Receiving Peer Feedback On Non-English Major’s Writing

Recently numerous scholars abroad and home began to study peer feedback, and achieved fruitful results.These studies included the effects of peer review versus teacher feedback, Chinese ESL students’ attitudestowards peer response, then significance of trained peer feedback. There were some researches about giving andreceiving peer feedback abroad, domestic studies were rarely, and inspired by this, the present empirical studyaims to study the respective influence of peer feedback of givers and receivers on non-English majors’ writing byseparating the feedback providing and receiving processes.The thesis first introduced the background, significance, objectives and structures of the researchrespectively, and reviewed the domestic and foreign researches about giving and receiving peer feedback, thenput forward the theoretical framework, mainly focused on the zone of proximal development theory andcooperative learning theory, and described the definitions of giving and receiving feedback, local and globalaspects of writing, then elaborated the research design. Based on Graner’s (1987) and Lundstrom and Baker’s(2009) studies, the author partially adopted their research method, by separating the peer feedback giving processand the receiving process and designed the study, and extended the research questions, divided the local andglobal aspects of writing into grammar, lexicon, structure, cohesion and development, and divided the giver andreceiver group into advanced, intermediate and low groups. Based on Villamil and De Guerrero’s (1998) andMin’s (2005,2006) feedback sheet, the present study enriched it and added specific examples in it. Theinstruments contained feedback sheet, students writing assignment, scoring criteria for CET4, Hamp-Lyons’s(1991) analytic scoring rubric and interviews. Both the quantitative approach and the qualitative approach wereapplied in this study. And the study was lasted a semester,90subjects from two classes which were laterrandomly and respectively treated by giving feedback class and receiving feedback class. Then followed by threetimes of training on peer review for givers and receivers respectively. The pre-test and post-test writings werecollected as data. After finishing writing, the author conducted interviews, which were also collected as data.The results were reported as follows:1. Generally, the participants of both the giver group and receivergroup as a whole have made progress in their writing, and the giver group improved significantly than thereceiver group;2. According to the comparison between the analytic scores of the pre-test and post-test in givergroup and receiver group, the giver group improved in global aspects: organization, cohesion and development,while the receiver group improved greatly in local aspects: grammar and lexicon but not in other aspects;3. Thewriting aspects that the students improved of different English proficiencies within each group is also different. In the giver group, low and intermediate groups have made much greater improvement. On the contrary, in thereceiver group, the advanced group has improved much more. Besides, according to the interview, the givers ofthe low and intermediate groups benefit great a deal in terms of organization, cohesion, and development, whilethe advanced receivers improved in all aspects, especially in grammar, as the feedback they received were intheir knowledge scope and could activate their ZPD effectively.