A Study Of Peer Feedback In English Writing Class Of English Majors Based On Dynamic System Theory

In recent years, many foreign scholars have begun to study peer feedback and it is seen as a complement to the teacher feedback. But there are only a few related studies in China. The research of dynamic system theory in applied linguistics is quite new, but the proposal has an important indication to language development research.In traditional foreign language writing class, teacher feedback is the leading method of correcting the compositions. But writing is in essence a kind of communication,and the object should not be pure assessment. The traditional writing feedback model ignores the language essence of interaction. Teachers and peers all play an important role of scaffolding in the zone of proximal development. This thesis mainly applies dynamic system theory to second language writing class. All time changing has become the main property of dynamic system theory. This thesis mainly researches how the peer feedback effect on English writing changes as time goes by. This thesis tried to answer these two questions:1. What attitudes do Chinese English majors hold towards peer feedback in their writing?2. What are the effects of peer feedback on students’ writing proficiency?Through a semester’s research, the researcher used questionnaires, interviews,pre-test and post-test to see how peer feedback affected students’ writing ability. Then we got following conclusions:After a semester’s learning, with the help of peer feedback, students in theexperimental group made significant improvement in writing proficiencies. The students in the control group also made some improvement although not as much as that in the experimental group. The difference gap between the students in EG was much smaller than that in CG. We could conclude that peer feedback improved their writing proficiency on the whole. From the questionnaires and the interview, we may tell that most of them had a positive attitude towards peer feedback and peers feedback was welcomed by the students. It could strengthen their cooperative awareness and improve their writing quality. So teachers should use peer feedback properly in their English writing class, using its positive effects to increase students’ interest and their overall writing proficiency.