The Effectiveness Of Peer Review In The Teaching Of English Writing

The application of peer review to the second language writing process hasremained quite a heated topic since the late1980s. However, the conflicting findingshave been obtained during the decades of research. Some researchers deemed thatpeers’ comments were viewed with skepticism and gained little revision, while someresearchers found that peer review was beneficial to students’ writing. Under thecircumstances, based on the process writing approach and cooperative learning theory,this thesis attempts to study the effectiveness of peer review in the teaching of Englishwriting to Chinese English majors.The research was based on the a-ten-week experiment carried out in Xi’anInternational Studies during the autumn semester of2012. The participants of thisresearch were junior students from two classes, and the English proficiency of thesetwo classes did not have obvious disparity. One class was regarded as the experimentalgroup and participated into the peer review experiment, while the other class wasviewed as the control group. Results of the investigation and analysis indicated thatpeer review could be effectively adopted in the teaching of English writing.Meanwhile, the application of peer review could be also useful for definingappropriate pedagogical implications for further English writing courses.