| Writing, an indispensable link in English teaching, can implicitly or explicitly reflect students’ comprehensive ability of English. There is a trend that the traditional product-oriented writing approach has given way to process-oriented writing approach,which earns its increasing popularity and has aroused widespread concern among researchers. Feedback, the essential part of this new approach, is one of the hot issues of the relevant researches in this field, and plenty of experts, scholars and teachers have been constantly conducting researches on it from different perspectives and with a variety of approaches, but some results are poles apart. Therefore, it is of great necessity to conduct a study to find out their real effect on the teaching of college English writing.Four questions are explored in this study:(1) What is the current situation of writing feedback?(2) What are the features of teacher feedback and peer feedback? How do students cope with these two kinds of feedback during the process of revision?(3) Is feedback of any use to the improvement of students’ writing competence? If yes, in what aspects do teacher feedback and peer feedback cause effects on students’ writing respectively?(4) What is students’ response to teacher feedback and peer feedback?The subjects in this study are 60 students of non-English major from two classes in Science and Technology College of Nanchang Hangkong University. The two classes were randomly divided into Experiment Class(EC) which received peer feedback and Control Class(CC) which received teacher feedback. During this study, after obtaining the writing proficiency of the subjects from EC and CC through a pre-test, the author gave a peer feedback training to EC. Then, all students were asked to finish 4 rounds of writing tasks in which two kinds of feedback were adopted respectively. At the end of the experiment, a post-test was arranged with two classes simultaneously.In addition to analyses of the experimental data by SPSS 17.0, results of the questionnaires and interview were taken as complement to get further findings and the following conclusions can be drawn:(1) The current situation of feedback on writing needs to be improved, and the feedback given by teachers fails to fulfill students’ expectation.(2) Students are capable of giving usable peer feedback with lower credibility yet higher incorporation compared with teacher feedback. With regard to the focus of feedback, teacher feedback focuses on mistakes not only in language form, but also in discourse organization and content; peer feedback places more emphases on the former.As for the effects on revisions, the amount of revisions on language form made by students in CC is similar to that on organization and content, whereas peer feedback leads to a higher percentage of successful revisions and self revisions on content.(3) The comparison of students’ performance in pre-test and post-test reveals that the writing ability of students in both CC and EC has been improved, which means both kinds of feedback are helpful and effective. Meanwhile, it can be seen from the differences of Standard Deviation that the gap of students’ writing competence in both CC and EC has been narrowed down while the discrepancy in peer feedback class declines more apparently.(4) Students hold positive attitude towards both teacher feedback and peer feedback,but they tend to prefer the combination of these two kinds of feedback.Therefore, under the guidance of process-oriented writing approach, it is advisable to combine teacher and peer feedback together in English writing teaching, and make the combination serve essential and complementary functions in improving students’ writing competence, interest and autonomy. |
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