Impact Of Interactive Peer Review On Writing Effects

Peer review, an important instructional activity in the writing process, is a source of feedback additional to teacher comments, has already aroused increasing research interest over the last two decades. However, the conflicting findings have been gained during the decades of researches. Some researchers found that peer review was beneficial to students’ writing proficiency because of its advantage and the supplement of teacher comments while some researchers reported that peer review still have many problems. They hold the view that students have limited English proficiency which prevents them from providing concrete and effective feedback, and the design of peer review in Chinese EFL writing class is mainly carried out in such steps: teachers instruct and illustrate how to implement peer review, then give out feedback checklists; reviewers read each other’s writing essay; students give their peers feedback depend on the checklist. However, such implementation of peer review cannot effectively improve students’ writing quality.In order to fill the gap of the peer review research and find a more effective way to implement peer review to improve Chinese college students’ writing proficiency, the present study is tentatively conducted to investigate the impact of interactive peer review on college students’ writing effects through experiment, textual analysis, questionnaire and semi-structured interview. The research was conducted in a foreign language university in Xi’an of China. The participants are 60 English majors of two classes(thirty for the control group and the experimental group respectively). The relevant results show that interactive peer review can indeed improve students’ writing effects, which is obvious in the aspect of content, organization among the five categories(content, organization, sentence structure, grammar and vocabulary). In addition, the majority of students hold positive attitude towards interactive peer review, considering that interactive peer review has more advantages over the traditional written peer review. Specifically, they not only benefit from the interaction but can improve their writing effect. What’s more, the research can also provide theoretical and pedagogical implications for improving college students’ writing effect in current English writing teaching research and practice in China.