The Effects Of Peer Feedback And Teacher Feedback On English Majors’ Writing

Feedback plays a crucial role in the writing development. Numerous studies conducted abroad on theeffectiveness of teacher and peer feedback have resulted in inconsistent and even conflicting findings. InChina, though plenty of scholars and researchers have made abundant investigations on the effectiveness ofpeer feedback from theoretical perspectives, relevant empirical studies in Chinese contexts are inadequate.Furthermore, the current situation of college English writing teaching is that correcting students’compositions is tedious and unrewarding chore, the forms of feedback is out of diversity and students keepon repeating the same errors in their subsequent writings. Therefore, what kind of feedback can be used toimprove students’ writing proficiency has become the major issue for the researchers. Recently, with theprevalence of process writing approach in English writing teaching, peer feedback has become a majorcomplement to teacher feedback and a focused issue in the research of English writing. However, variouskinds of findings on peer feedback are inconsistent.In view of this, the present study investigates whether peer feedback can provide a resource forsolving the current issue in college English writing by integrating peer feedback with teacher feedback inthe writing course through employing both qualitative and quantitative methods. Apart from textual andquestionnaire data from33participants, interviews from9individual students are also employed in thestudy. By doing so, the researcher examines the adoption of the participants at different writing levels interms of content, organization and grammar in employing teacher feedback and peer feedback. Meanwhile,the researcher also investigates the participants’ attitudes towards teacher feedback and peer feedback. Atlast, the researcher attempts to put forward some advice and methods for teachers on how to make use ofpeer feedback and to provide feedback points in correcting students’ compositions.On the basis of three theoretical foundations, including Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal DevelopmentTheory, Schmidt’s Noticing Hypothesis and Long’s Interaction Hypothesis, the researcher addresses thefollowing three research questions:1. How do English majors at different writing levels adopt peerfeedback in terms of content, organization and grammar?2. How is teacher feedback adopted by Englishmajors at different writing levels in terms of content, organization and grammar?3. What are the Englishmajors’ attitudes towards peer feedback and teacher feedback?The present study was conducted among33sophomore English majors in Zhixing College ofNorthwest Normal University. The participants were divided into the high, medium and low levels of achievers according to their scores in the tests and their in-class performance. The study lasted for11weeks,in which33participants needed to complete three rounds of argumentative writing with three drafts foreach composition. The first drafts were modified by their peers in the group based on peer feedback sheetswhich covered three aspects: content, organization and grammar. The second drafts were reviewed by tworaters in terms of content, organization and grammar. However, only three drafts in the third round ofwriting cycle were collected as research data. After finishing three rounds of writing, questionnaires andinterviews were used to examine the participants’ attitudes towards peer feedback and teacher feedback.Both quantitative and qualitative data were received in the present study. The data collected in the presentstudy were analyzed by Paired-samples T Test in (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) SPSS13.0toinvestigate the participants’ attitudes towards peer feedback and teacher feedback.The results are reported as follows:1. In terms of content, organization and grammar, the participantsare more inclined to adopt comments on grammar rather than those on content and organization no mattercomments from teacher or peers.2. The participants’ writing proficiency has a negative correlation with thepercentage of adoption of peer feedback points, but a positive correlation with the percentage of adoptionof teacher feedback points.3. Although the participants can make good use of both teacher and peerfeedback to rectify their compositions, the adoption of teacher feedback is higher than that of peer feedbackwith79.2%against68.0%. Simultaneously, it can also be seen from questionnaire and interview that mostof the participants hold positive attitudes towards teacher feedback but they also value the role of peerfeedback in their revisions.According to the above conclusions, enough emphasis should be given to both teacher feedback andpeer feedback, as they are beneficial to improving students’ writing. As a complimentary source offeedback, peer feedback can be introduced to English writing instruction. Therefore, the author providessome suggestions on how to employ teacher and peer feedback in EFL writing teaching, such as providingpeer feedback training, reforming the current grading mode, and incorporating multi-drafts approach intocollege writing teaching.