An Action Research On The Application To Peer Feedback In Senior High School English-writing Teaching

Feedback is regarded as a important means to improve writing ability. Yet students solely pay attention to the scores while ignore the teacher's feedback on their compositions although teachers carefully correct each English composition, and point out the errors or unreasonable places, hoping students be able to have improvement or corrections in the next writing. Obviously, how to use feedback to improve students' writing level is a practical problem that the teachers are facing.A growing body of research shows peer feedback, as an important step in process writing approach, gets more attention among scholars at home and abroad. Handful studies have confirmed that peer feedback is helpful in proving writing level.However, most studies took college students as participants yet very few studies looked into the implication of it to English writing practice in senior high school.which deserves exploration. Therefore, for the possible theoretical significance and practical significance, the author attempts to conduct a five-month action research to apply peer feedback to senior English writing class.The study attempted to answer the following research questions:1) Does peer feedback help high school students improve English writing level?If it does, in which aspects?2) Do the students accept peer feedback?52 students, including 30 boys and 22 girls with an average age of 18.5 from one class of Grade 3, a Senior high school in Heyuan Guangdong took participated in the project. The project had 3 round actions, based on the action research model of "planaction- observation- reflection". The scores of the compositions in pre-test and posttest were used as the main gauge for evaluation. Questionnaires, interviews and classroom observation were employed for data collection.The results indicated that:1) Peer feedback is helpful for student's writing, especially in the aspect of content and structure.2) Peer feedback is also helpful to raise students' interest in writing, improve their writing strategies and develop their cooperative ability.3) Most students hold positive attitude toward peer feedback. They think that peer feedback benefits them in a few aspects in writing, especially in content and organization. However, the students of lower English proficiency still expect theteacher to correct the grammars for them.Based on the action research, some suggestions are put forward for other English teachers to do reference.