Effects Of Peer Feedback On Non-English Major Students’ Writing Self-efficacy: An Empirical Study

The theory of self-efficacy was proposed by the social psychologist Albert Bandura inBandura’ Social Cognitive Theory. Bandura believes that the belief which people hold abouttheir abilities and efforts’ outcome would greatly affect their behavior. The study on it revealsthat it has made certain influence on the learner’s performance, which is most obvious inlanguage learning. Moreover, self-efficacy is an important intrinsic factor in students’ Englishlearning performance as it can predict and influence students’ English learning achievement.Generally speaking, writing self-efficacy beliefs are individuals’ general perceptions oftheir capabilities in the domain of English writing. Shell and Murphy thought that writingself-efficacy is composed of two parts. The first is the confidence for the student to performparticular writing-skills in a successful way like grammar, language usage, composition, andmechanical-skills like correct punctuation. The second is confidence for the student tocomplete particular writing-tasks in a successful way like writing a paper, short-fiction storiesor letters to friends.Based on Mangelsdorf’s research, Peer review, also regarded as peer tutoring, peercomment, or peer feedback, is a kind of ordinary activities in process oriented writing classes.Researches have proved that it is helpful for students to develop the critical thinking andenhance their competence in problem analysis and problem solving. And it is an effectiveway to make students interested in English writing assignments and sooth their writinganxiety to some extent. Many Chinese students suffer from low self-efficacy in writing,which affect their attainment negatively. This study attempted to investigate if peer feedbackis helpful and to what extent it can help to enhance their sense of writing self-efficacyThis thesis is based on an experimental research which was conducted in YanshanUniversity. The participants were divided into experimental class and control class. Peerfeedback was integrated into the instruction of Experimental class, while traditional writingteaching without peer feedback was adopted in Control class. The research aimed to firstunderstand the current level of non-English learners’ writing self-efficacy in Yanshan University. Then it tries to find out the effects of peer feedback on students’ writingself-efficacy. Finally, the author would focus on the effects of peer feedback on differentlevels of writing self-efficacy and learn the difference of effectiveness between highachievers and low achievers in writing self-efficacy.The data were collected through writing self-efficacy scale, interviews, classroomobservation. Independent Sample T-test and Pair-sample test were applied to find out theeffects of peer feedback on writing self-efficacy between the two classes and between thehigh achievers and low achievers in experimental group respectively. The analysis of thequantitative and qualitative data led to the following findings: First, the writing self-efficacyof Non-English major freshman in Yanshan University is not relatively high. The Overallstudy results show that their English writing self-efficacy are not satisfactory. For moststudents, they do not have high confidence in the writing process. Self-efficacy on bothwriting tasks and writing skills are low. Second, the intervention of peer feedback broughtabout a statistically significant enhancement of non-English majors students’ writingself-efficacy in Yanshan University. Third, Students of low level of writing self-efficacybenefite more from peer feedback than students of high level do.