An Investigation On Peer Feedback Of Master Of Education In English

Peer feedback affords learners to detect, diagnose and solve writing problems. It also embodies the new teaching and learning philosophy of cooperative learning and autonomous learning. For Master of Education (M.Ed) students of English Education who are cultivated as pre-service teachers, the great potential of peer feedback, on one hand, lies in strengthening M.Ed students' awareness of cooperative learning and critical thinking, which conforms to the goal of M.Ed students' training program. On the other hand,M.Ed students' peer feedback performance will generates an impact on how they will offer feedback to their students' writing. In this manner,it is necessary to study M.Ed students' peer feedback performance.This study aims at exploring M.Ed students' peer feedback performance; whether student performance on peer feedback meets teacher guidelines and the possible reasons;what are the applicable measures to optimize M.Ed students' peer feedback performance.In order to solve these questions, text analysis and interview are employed as two instruments. 100 texts (each student for 5 texts) are gathered from 20 M.Ed students'course project. According to the course requirements, reading a self-selected article,writing a response and inviting a classmate to do peer feedback are basic procedures.Text analysis, based on the peer feedback typology made by Beason (1993), makes for finding M.Ed students' peer feedback types and whether student performance on peer feedback types meets teacher guidelines. To probe into the underlying reasons and applicable measures to optimize peer feedback performance, an interview is conducted among 10 interviewees whose texts have been analyzed.The research findings are shown as follows. First, M.Ed students give peer feedback mainly from four aspects and two dimensions. Four aspects include language, structure and organization, content, suggestions and two dimensions are weakness and strength.Second,most of the M.Ed students have conformed to the teacher's basic guidelines,delivering peer feedback from the four aspects and two dimensions. But some gaps still exist between student performance and teacher guidelines. For instance, students focus more on language feedback rather than content and organization feedback; are more affirmative rather than critical; seldom provide pertinent suggestions. The reasons can roughly be attributed to students' perceptions towards peer feedback, students' English writing proficiency, students' procrastination, friendship bias and face-saving,non-specific guidelines, students' interests and devotion to reading materials, and without fully understanding the value of peer feedback. In the end, pertinent and applicable suggestions are raised to optimize M.Ed students' peer feedback quality, like monitoring students' peer feedback work regularly; making full use of online peer feedback, guiding students to do peer feedback; forming interests-based groups, and making students fully understand the value of peer feedback.