| Effective feedback, as a significant part of English writing instruction, can improve students’ writing performance. Nevertheless, studies show that the present model of English teacher feedback is burdensome, time-consuming and ineffective. And comparative experiment studies in the teaching practice prove that peer feedback is a good choice to provide some help for teachers to comment writings. Previous researches have been done at home and abroad focusing on the effectiveness of peer feedback in different contexts, such as first language(L1) and second language(L2). But because of the different variables of peer feedback activities, research results have been mixed and even conflicting. So it is essential that more experiments should be made to check and complement peer feedback’s studies. Also, there are not many experimental studies conducted on the Chinese college non-English majors’ application of peer feedback and researches on their incorporation rate of peer feedback and their attitudes’ effects on English writings have limitations. So the author believes that there is a necessity to check the effects of college non-English majors’ peer feedbacks in English as a foreign language(EFL) contexts. On the basis of the process-oriented writing approach, the zone of proximal development theory and the cooperative learning theory, an experiment is carried out to answer the following three questions:1. How do the Chinese non-English majors at different English writing proficiency levels incorporate their peers’ feedbacks in revision?2. How does the trained peer feedback affect non-English majors’ English writings?3. How do the Chinese non-English majors’ attitudes towards peer feedback affect their English writings?In the experiment, 60 sophomore students majoring in advertising from one provincial normal university in Changchun are divided into two groups averagely which contain students from three different English writing levels: one is control group(CG) who receives traditional teacher feedbacks, the other is experiment group(EG) who receives peer feedbacks. During fifteen weeks’ experiment, pre-test, post-test, two questionnaires and a follow-up interview are carried through and the data are analyzed with the help of Statistical Product and Service Solutions(SPSS). Conclusions are made from the analyses of tests’ scores, questionnaires and interviews on a basis of qualitative and quantitative research methods.The results show that firstly, almost all the students are willing to incorporate their peers’ suggestions into their writings and obtain the ability to select peer students’ suggestions rationally. But the degree of incorporation is a little different according to the students’ English writing proficiencies. Students who have the lowest English writing proficiency adopt the largest number of peer feedbacks, medium English writing level students incorporate the second largest number of peer feedbacks while the students who have the highest English writing proficiency accept the least number. Secondly, peer feedback can not only help students improve their writing performance but also reduce the gap of students’ writing proficiency. Moreover, while they regard teachers as authorities, Chinese college non-English major students hold more positive attitudes towards the employment of peer feedback after the experimental study. And participants’ attitudes play an important role in English writing: students who are the most positive to it receive the highest improvement.The findings indicate that peer feedback can motivate students’ writing interests, highlight a sense of audience, encourage the cooperation between students and most of all improve their writing performances. So it can be implemented as a complimentary method in the EFL writing classroom. |
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