An Empirical Study On Promoting Learners’ English Writing Autonomy By Peer Assessment In The Senior High School

English writing is a basically important skill in English learning in the senior high school,but the teachers confront the difficulties such as time-consuming and low efficiency, sowriting is lack of enough attention. The students’ writing proficiency is usually judged by afinal test with a standard in the whole term. For each student having different attitudes to thesame thing, different writing skills, also the knowledge level low or high and some otherissues, their essays are also different. When different teachers evaluate the same composition,they have different thoughts and views because of many kinds of factors. It is hard to justifyequally and stimulate their enthusiasm, and it would frustrate the motivation, which is notbeneficial for the cultivation and development of learning autonomy.In recent years, according to the problems taken by summative assessment, manyresearchers focus on the influences of formative assessment on improving students’ writingability. As an innovative assessment of formative assessment, most of the studies on peerassessment are limited in the feasibility of improving writing ability by conducting peerassessment. The empirical study on improving writing autonomy by peer assessment is rare.This study would answer these questions by experiment:1) Is peer assessment beneficial inimproving senior high school students’ writing proficiency?2) Is peer assessment able to helpstudents improve their writing autonomy and writing proficiency?This study adopted test, questionnaire survey and interview as the instruments. Theauthor chose two classes from grade two in a high school. The experiment lasted17weeks.Experiment class(EC) used peer assessment to evaluate their writing proficiency, while thecontrol class(CC)still used traditional assessment. By writing tests, questionnaire and theinterview, it demonstrated that by conducting peer assessment in EC, students’ Englishwriting proficiency improved significantly; peer assessment made more active effects onstudents’ writing attitude, motivation, writing strategy, and behavior than that using traditionalassessment. It boosted students’ learner autonomy. The students reflected their own problemson writing and modified by assessing others’ composition, so that the writing autonomy wasimproved.