Case Study On Improving Senior High School Students’ English "Basic Writing" Performance Through Peer Correction

Peer correction is an important part of the process-focused approach. It not only requires students to think independently, find problems, but also asks the students to cooperate with other students. In recent years, there are a lot of studies on error correction in English teaching at home and abroad. Many scholars research on error correction by teachers. Only a few focus on peer correction.Thus, the author conducted a case study on peer correction in the framework of cooperative learning and Bruner’discovery method. Ten students were selected as the subjects. The study attempts to find out the influence of peer correction on the students’error detecting ability and English "basic writing" performance. The compositions in the four tests written by the ten students from Grade2in Huiyang No.1experimental high school were taken as the instruments to measure students’ error detecting ability. After4months directive training of peer error correction, the teacher took two steps to observe and judge the students’error detection ability. Firstly, the teacher recorded the number of errors made by students in the compositions and the number of errors found out by peers in the team. Secondly, the teacher calculated how many of the errors were not detected by peers. If the number of the actual errors and the types of errors detected by students increase gradually, it shows the error detecting ability of students is improved. Besides, four pretests and posttests were taken as the instruments to measure students’English "basic writing" performance. If the grades increased, the English "basic writing" performance improved.Based on the data from the tests and students’ compositions, we obtained the main findings as follows:Firstly, the introduction of peer correction within the process-focused approach in senior high school students’ English "basic writing" teaching can significantly improve the students’ English writing ability. Secondly, the application of peer correction in traditional teaching can obviously improve the students’ability in error survey. Besides assisting the teachers in teaching, this approach would indirectly improve students’ English writing at the same time. The implication for writing teaching is that peer correction in the senior high school students’ English "basic writing" can not only divide the teachers’pressure in composition correction, but also arouse students’ enthusiasm in learning. Therefore, this peer correction method can be applied to high school writing instruction with teacher’s guidance.