An Empirical Study On The Application Of Peer Feedback To College Students' English Writing Anxiety

The cultivation of English writing ability has always played an essential role in college English writing teaching.According to some researches,Chinese students often have English writing anxiety while completing a writing task.Writing anxiety has influence on students' writing ability.In recent years,with the development and advancement of English writing teaching method at home and abroad,process writing approach has received attention.Peer feedback,as a vital process in process writing approach,received popularity and attention.This study aims to investigate the effect of peer feedback on college students' writing anxiety.The following three questions will be addressed:(1)What is the relationship between writing anxiety and college students' English writing ability?(2)What changes do students' writing anxiety have by applying peer feedback to college English writing class?(3)What effect does peer feedback have on college students' English writing ability?The thesis based on Process Writing Approach,Cooperative Learning Theory and Zone of Proximal Development Theory(ZPD)is intended to explore the effect of peer feedback on students' English writing anxiety and writing ability.This study adopts qualitative and quantitative methods to conduct an empirical study on seventy-four students from two classes of 2015 in Shenyang Normal University.One class belongs to the experimental group(EG)and the other is control group(CG).Before the experiment,the seventy-four students are asked to finish a questionnaire and a pre-test.During the experiment,students in the EG use peer feedback.Theyevaluate each others' writing,and write comments in the feedback sheets.Then,students need to write a second draft according to their peers' suggestions.While for students in the CG,they need to revise their writing according to the evaluations of the teacher.After the experiment,four students,based on their writing ability are selected to do a semi-structured interview.At the end of the experiment,a post-test is conducted to all students.This study lasts for a semester.The data for the study are collected from questionnaire,pre-test and post-test,as well as semi-structured interview.And the data are analyzed by SPSS 16.0.Based on the analysis result,the following conclusions can be drawn:(1)There exists negative relationship between students' English writing anxiety and writing ability.In other words,students with higher level of writing anxiety will be easily influenced by their negative emotional feelings in writing tasks,and their writing ability will be limited.(2)Students in the EG have reduced their writing anxiety by applying peer feedback after a semester's training,while for students in the CG,their writing anxiety remains to be the same.(3)Peer feedback can improve students' English writing ability to a certain degree.In peer feedback activity,students have got more chances to communicate with each other and learn from each other.This decreases students' writing anxiety and has positive effect on the improvement of their English writing ability.In conclusion,this study finds that students' English writing anxiety and writing ability are negatively correlated.By applying peer feedback to college English writing class,students can reduce their writing anxiety,and improve their English writing ability.So in the future college English writing class,peer feedback can be adopted as an effective method in reducing students' writing anxiety,and promoting students' English writing ability.