The Effects Of Peer Feedback In Junior English Writing Teaching

As an output activity, English writing is a difficult but important part in English teaching. In China, the product approach is mainly advocated in traditional English writing teaching. However, one of its consequences lies in the fact that most students become passive and inactive, and lose interests and passion in English writing. Meanwhile, it is a time-consuming and energy-consuming workload for teachers to evaluate the detailed mistakes in great piles of students’ writings while the students only care about their grades instead of the writing problems they are expected to solve. Because of such a situation, many teachers and linguists have done quite a few researches to review students’English writings. In the 1970s, the process approach attracted increasingly more attention. This new method promotes the process of writing instead of the result, and encourages students to exchange their writing works, think independently, discuss with the partners and then give their feedback to modify the compositions under a certain guidance. Peer feedback is an important procedure of process-oriented approach, which has been applied in the teaching of writing in English-speaking countries. In China, nevertheless, the researches of peer feedback mostly focused on university, college groups or senior high school students. Therefore, it would be of significance to do research on the effects of peer feedback in junior English writing teaching.Based on the process writing theory, collaborative learning theory, and interaction hypothesis theory, the present study is devoted to implementing peer feedback in the English writing teaching for seventh-grade students in Changjun Meixihu Middle school. The present study has lasted for more than four months (from March to July,2014), sixty junior high students were involved in the present research. All the students were divided into three groups (a high-level group, a middle-level group and a lower-level group) according to their grades of English writing in the final examination (in February,2014). The study was implemented in the class which was taught by the present author. This research was divided into three stages respectively:before the experiment, during the experiment and after the experiment. Questionnaires were both adopted before and after this experiment. Both quantitative and qualitative data were collected in order to answer two main questions:(1) To what extent is the peer feedback helpful in changing the junior high school students’ attitudes towards English writing? (2) What effects does the peer feedback have on the accuracy of junior high school students’ English writing? Tentative conclusion could be arrived at according to the analysis of the pre-test and post-test in detail:Firstly, peer feedback is recognized and warmly welcomed by the sixty students in general, and promotes students’ interests and enthusiasm for English writing. Secondly, it can reduce the grammatical mistakes students make in English writing and help to improve the language accuracy in terms of word choice, spelling, subject-verb agreement, verb tense and word collocation. Thirdly, the application of peer feedback is feasible among junior high school students and peer feedback should be adopted as an alternative way in junior high English writing teaching. The present study is necessary and special in terms of its experimental subjects, as more attention is focused on the collaborative learning in English writing teaching.