An Investigation Into Senior Middle School Students’ Perceptions Of Peer Feedback In English Writing

English writing ability plays a very important part among all the four abilities of English learners. With the establishment of the leading role of process approach in English writing pedagogy, feedback which is regarded as a central and critical contribution to the evolution of a piece of English writing is very necessary and important to English learners. Teacher feedback is widely employed in assisting EFL students to learn to write, yet studies indicate shortages of teacher feedback in improving senior middle school students’ writing abilities and writing skills. Peer feedback is reported to have more advantages compared with teacher feedback. Hence,it is of great significance to study senior middle school students’ peer feedback in English writing in order to enhance the efficiency of peer feedback comprehensively and to improve students’ writing abilities by cooperating with peers.The present study tries to investigate peer feedback in English writing by concentrating on senior middle school students. The study was carried out in Jiangxi Fengxin No.1 Middle School. The participants in this study were 123 Senior One students. It was conducted in two classes in which the researcher implemented peer feedback in English writing. It aimed to explore students’ response to peer feedback.Both the benefits of peer feedback for readers and writers were examined.Additionally, it also studied revisions responding to peer feedback. For the purpose of obtaining relevant data, a questionnaire and a semi-structured interview were used to collect data in this investigation. The data from this research were analyzed by the SPSS 13.0.The study has showed the following major findings: 1) most students are aware of the importance of peer feedback during the writing process, and they have a favorable opinion towards it. What’s more, Students regard peer feedback as a useful and effective method in the teaching of English writing. 2) compared with the traditional way of teacher feedback, to some extent, students find that peer feedback can definitely help them to make individual progress in different aspects of English.Peer feedback can facilitate students to develop critical thinking and revising strategies for better writing. 3) students realize that the way peer feedback conducted and students trained influence the effectiveness of students’ writing. The teachershould design a uniform of criteria to the students for reference so that students can cooperate better with their peers. 4) the merits of traditional teachers’ feedback are confirmed by most students. And they think their teachers should combine these two types so that the function of peer feedback and teacher feedback can be maximized.Based on the findings, the study offers some pedagogical implications for the future English writing teaching. There are a few limitations of the present study, and some problems need to be further explored. The most effective ways should be conducted to implement peer feedback. Peer feedback training should be carried out carefully and comprehensively so that the benefits of the peer feedback activity can be fully realized.