A Comparative Study On Effectiveness Of Teacher Feedback And Peer Feedback In College English Writing Teaching

Teacher feedback and peer feedback are the two basic ways to improve collegestudents’ writing proficiency, and also are used frequently to increase the efficiency ofcollege writing teaching. Some previous studies have been conducted to investigatethe related influential factors of writing proficiency, the effectiveness of feedback andthe way to improve the efficiency of writing teaching. But the research results varied alot, some even were contradictory. Therefore, the present study is designed to analyzeand compare the effectiveness of different sources of feedback, teacher feedback andpeer feedback, empirically. It is of high value to recognize the influential factors andthe mechanism of feedback effectiveness in English writing teaching and exploredeeply the way to improve the effects of college English writing.Two classes of60freshmen from Jincheng College of Nanjing University ofAeronautics and Astronautics, an independent college, participated in the presentstudy. One class was selected to be the experimental class and received peer feedback,the other class was the comparison class which received teacher feedback. Initially,the participants took part in a writing task, on which their writing proficiency wasexamined to make sure there was no significant difference between the two classesbefore the examination. Then they were required to fulfill four multi-draft writingtasks receiving teacher feedback and peer feedback respectively. After the completionof the tasks in a regular class, the participants were given a posttest to reexamine theirwriting proficiency. This study analyzed the effects of feedback holistically andanalytically by conducting the quantitative analysis from both the perspectives ofholistic scoring and the dimensions of writing fluency, accuracy and complexity. So asto test whether teacher feedback and peer feedback are effective in improvingstudents’ writing and compare the degree of improvement made by teacher feedbackand peer feedback respectively if their effectiveness are confirmed. Meanwhile, tomake certain students’ attitudes towards teacher feedback and peer feedback,questionnaire and interviews were designed to enrich the quantitative research of the comparison.T tests and ANOVA were conducted to answer the research questions. The majorfindings can be summarized as follows.(1) The overall writing proficiency ofstudents in experimental class improved significantly compared with the proficiencyin the pretest while there’s no significant improvement in comparison class, whichshows that peer feedback could better improve students’ writing proficiency.(2) Theholistic score of experimental class in posttest is significantly higher than the score incomparison class, which indicates that peer feedback performs better than teacherfeedback in improving students’ writing proficiency.(3) Students in experimentalclass improve their proficiency in linguistics accuracy and lexical complexity, whilestudents in comparison class do not. It suggests that peer feedback performs betterthan teacher feedback in improving students’ writing accuracy and lexical complexity,and peer feedback has more obvious effects on improving students’ ability invocabulary and grammatical use.According to the questionnaire and interviews, students tend to overestimate theeffects of teacher feedback while they underestimate the effects of peer feedbackuniversally. Results from the statistics analysis show that peer feedback couldsignificantly improve students’ holistic writing proficiency and their linguisticaccuracy and lexical complexity while teacher feedback does not. However, it isproved from the questionnaires that students universally lack confidence in peerfeedback. Students prefer to choose teacher feedback as the main source of writingfeedback. They respect deeply teachers’ authority in writing teaching, revise andrewrite more frequently the essays with teacher feedback and are more satisfied withthe writing practice based on teacher feedback. The similar conclusion was got fromthe interview that more freshmen rely more on teacher feedback to improve theirwriting proficiency and are short of the acceptance and confirmation of peer feedback.Based upon the analysis above, teacher feedback and peer feedback are all veryimportant in improving students’ writing proficiency and deserve sufficient attentionto the writing teaching in the future. The present study has great practical significancein the English teaching and learning. The research findings contribute to a better understanding of the role of peer feedback and make suggestions for writing teachingin the future. First of all, to improve the effectiveness of peer feedback, the effects ofpeer feedback should be firmly confirmed and be applied to college English writingclasses besides teacher feedback. Secondly, to improve the effectiveness of teacherfeedback, teachers could make good use of conferencing and improve the effects ofteacher feedback through the increasing of the two-way communication. Thirdly, toimprove the effectiveness of feedback, the pattern of mixed feedback should bestrongly advocated and incorporated in the future.