An Action Research Of Teacher And Peer Feedback Integration On Senior Students’ English Writing

In the English writing in teaching in Ningbo, feedback towards students’ writing is generally in the form of teacher written feedback or teacher assessment while peer feedback is hardly applied. Writing feedback focuses on the summative assessment with only one draft rather than the process evaluation with multiple drafts. The time-consuming single form of teacher feedback without teachers’ face-to-face instruction apparently limits the students’ appreciation and adoption of teacher feedback, thus leading to lower efficiency in improving their English writing abilities.Researchers home and abroad have made a large number of studies on teacher feedback and peer feedback respectively, pointing out both forms of feedback have their own advantages and disadvantages. However, few researches are done on the integration of teacher and peer feedback, especially targeted at senior school students. Aimed at discovering the effective feedback mode in English writing, this research applies the integration of teacher and peer feedback to English writing teaching in senior school and try to solve the following questions.1. Does the integration of teacher and peer feedback positively improve students’ English writing level?2. Is the integration of teacher and peer feedback effective in promoting students abilities in the four aspects : technical details, grammar errors, content & structures, sentence coherence? 22 students from one class in Ningbo Rongan Senior High school participated in this 35-week action research, which had two rounds with each lasting 16 weeks. In the process, students practised writing 16 short passages and used the integrating mode of teacher and peer feedback to rewrite and polish their writings. A pre-test, mid-test and post-test were given to the students. According to the data analysis of pre-test and mid-test as well as the interview from some students,the feedback mode of the first-round action research was adjusted. The acquired data from the pre-test and post-test was analyzed by SPSS19.0. A qualitative analysis was conducted on the pre-test writing and post-test writing of one student.The main findings are :1. The integration of teacher and peer feedback can effectively improve senior school students writing proficiency.2. The integration of teacher and peer feedback is an effective mode in English teaching in senior school, which makes a significant difference to improving the technical details and sentence coherence but has little effect on grammar errors and content & structures.The questionnaire after the research indicates most students are fully convinced the integrating mode of teacher and peer feedback is the most effective writing feedback in senior school. Meanwhile, they expect to gain more specific and personalized guidance from teacher feedback in the future.