An Empirical Study Of The Effectiveness Of Peer-assessment In Junior High School English Writing

English writing is an indispensable part in language teaching,playing a key role in cultivating students’ comprehensive ability in language using.However,it is rather difficult for teachers to improve students’ writing ability.Coincident with the introduction of peer assessment,many scholars spare no efforts to implement peer assessment into English writing for the purpose of improving students’ writing ability and proving its effectiveness.Nevertheless it is noted that,based on literature review,previous researches on peer assessment mainly focus on college students and senior high school students.A handful of studies take Junior high school students as participants.In consideration of the situation,this thesis aims to explore the implementation of peer assessment on English writing teaching in Junior high school based on the guidance of socioculture theory and make out the following questions: firstly,Can peer assessment improve Junior high school students’ English writing ability? What are the effects respectively concerning content,grammar and structure of their writing?Secondly,what’s the attitude of students with different English writing levels towards peer assessment?In order to answer the above questions,the experiment is carried out on eighty-eight students from two classes of eight grade in my internship Junior high school for twelve weeks.Every participant finishes four composition tasks.Experimental class receives training of peer assessment in the beginning and then give assessment to their peers.After receiving peer assessment,participants had to revise their writing as second draft based on assessment.Finally,students had to complete the third draft according to teacher’s indirect assessment.However,the controlled class only received teacher’s assessment in traditional way.Through data analysis of pre-test and post test with SPSS20.0 and discussion of questionnaire and interview,the above questions have been solved.Firstly,the experimental class make greater progress than the controlled class in English writing.And students from experimental class have improved on content,grammar andstructure.While there is a little improvement in aspect of structure and much progress made on content and grammar,which is beneficial from peer assessment and enlightenment from reading peers’ writings.Secondly,by analyzing questionnaire and interview,the finding is that all the students with different English writing levels keep positive attitude towards peer assessment and believe that they gain a lot from it.However,high level students and medium level students reckon that peer assessment can’t replace teacher assessment.Therefore,they recommended that peer assessment and teacher assessment should integrate into writing instruction so as to play a positive role in improving students’ writing ability.To sum up,peer assessment has positive impact on Junior high school students’ English writing and it can guide English teaching as well.Hence peer assessment is suggested to apply to English writing teaching in Junior high school.