The Effectiveness Of Peer Feedback In Teaching English Writing In Senior High School

As an integrated part of writing instruction, peer feedback is commonly used in L1 writing course.However, many English teachers in China are not familiar with peer feedback. Peer feedback activity and few empirical researches have been conducted to find out the effectiveness of peer feedback in writing.How can senior high school English teacher help students to improve the quality of composition and the writing ability by providing feed backs? Under the guidance of Zone of Proximal Development theory,Collaborative learning theory and Process approach, the author solved the following questions:1) Does peer feedback improve students' English writing proficiency?2) Which language aspects of students' writing change after they receive peer feedback?3) What are the students' attitudes toward peer feedback?The participants in this study were 115 students from the Yu Cai senior high school of Shan Dong Province. All the students had the same educational background. They have learned English for eight years:three years of primary school, three years in junior high school and two years in senior high school. Their age ranged from 16 to 17. The author randomly chose one class of 60 students as the experiential group(EG) who received peer feedback training and peer feedback activities; the other class of 55 students were chosen as the control group(CG) who received the traditional writing method. Before this study, students did not receive any kinds of formal training of English writing. Five instruments were used to gain the answers of the three questions. Those instruments were: pre-test and post-test, two questionnaires, a peer feedback sheet, a semi-structures interviews, peers' feedback on the composition. Those instruments were used respectively to accomplish the researching goals.A comparison was made between the means of score in EG and CG. The mean scores of EG rose form 16.4333(pre-test) to 17.1667(post-test); So, the increase of mean score in EG is 0.7334. The mean scores of CG rose form 16.3636(pre-test) to 16.4909(post-test) and the increase of mean score in CG is0.1273. From table 5.5, which shows that there was a significant difference between pre-test and post-test of EG for the value of Sig.(2-tailed) is 0.000 <0.05. It means that the EG has got a big achievement in writing proficiency after the peer feedback activity. The author concluded that peer feedback could improve the quality of students' composition and students' writing ability. Additionally, the interview results showed that peer feedback brought many benefits to students, such as giving more ideas, helping to improve the organization of the composition, and enriching the contents.After experienced two writing cycles, there was a growing tendency that students pay more attention to content and organization, which belong to the deep-level language aspects. Analysis the results from questionnaire two, the author found that students thought peers' comments were useful. Those comments could enrich the contents, improve the organization of composition. As a result, the author concluded that peer feedback effect content and organization deeply than other language aspects.To investigate students' attitude toward peer feedback, the author analyzed the data collected from two questionnaires. With the help of SPSS 17.0, the author found that students attitude towards peer feedback have changed greatly after this research.In a short, peer feedback was effective in improving students' writing. It can be used as a complimentary method and should be introduced to English writing instruction.