An Investigation Into University Students’ Perceptions Of Peer Feed Back In EFL Writing Classroom

Since the 1980 s, researchers started showing a gradual interest in investigating the topic of peer feedback in ESL writing classroom. Peer feedback has now become one of the important components of research areas, and has gained great attention from many researchers. Although an extensive research on peer feedback has been conducted abroad, few studies on peer feedback in China were carried out. For this reason, it is necessary to make more studies on peer feedback in Chinese writing context, so that Chinese English teachers and learners can gain some implications for English teaching and learning.The present study examined non-English major students’ perceptions of peer feedback in English writing. The subjects in this study were 140 second-year non-English majors from Psychology College of JiangXi Normal University. The study first investigated the students’ responses to peer feedback in overall attitude, and then it explored the differences in students’ attitude towards peer feedback. Next, it examined the effects of English proficiency on students’ attitude to peer feedback. The data in this study were collected by a questionnaire, a semi-structured interview and CET-4 writing, and were carefully analyzed by the SPSS Version 13.0. The major findings of this study were summarized as follows:1) Non-English major students held a positive attitude towards peer feedback.75% of participants admitted that they liked peer feedback activity. 62.1% of them thought peer feedback activity could help them to improve their writing ability. 65%liked reading peers’ writing. 72.2% of them liked receiving peer oral feedback, and65.7% of the participants thought that it was beneficial to read peers’ written feedback.In addition, most students preferred to receiving peers’ oral feedback(M=3.59),reading peers’ writing(M=3.50) and reading peers’ written comments(M=3.36).What’s more, most students claimed that peer feedback activity could make some changes into their writing content, organization and language.2) Although most students were in a positive attitude towards peer feedback in EFL writing class, there were some differences in attitude towards peer feedback between high-level and low-level students. In terms of reading peers’ writing and reviewing peers’ oral comments, two groups showed significant differences. Thelow-level students’ means of both reading peers’ writing and reviewing peers’ oral comments were lower than those of high-level students(p<0.05). However, there were no significant differences of reading peers’ written comments between high-level and low-level students.The findings in this study have implications for the teaching of English writing in China. Firstly, the teachers should not only use teacher feedback but also actively add peer feedback to EFL writing class. When it comes to actual use of peer feedback,teachers should be flexible in the implementation of peer feedback. They should take students’ proficiencies into account so that it can make peer feedback work better in EFL writing class. At last, teachers should encourage students to give more complex feedback, so that the students can learn a lot from both giving and receiving peer feedback.