The Effects Of Different Peer Feedback Roles On The English Writing Of Senior-high School Students

Based on the studies on peer feedback home and abroad,this study attempted to explore what changes senior high students have in their attitudes and in their writing after they play different roles in the peer feedback activities.The data were mainly collected from classroom observations,interviews,a questionnaire after the study,and students' writing samples before and after the study.Based on the data analysis,the major findings of the study were drawn as follows:Firstly,data analysis shows,both groups gradually changed from being reluctant to being active to performing their respective roles in the peer feedback activities.With regard to changes in emotion,the ‘givers' group's initial painful feelings about the hard task of providing feedback were gradually eased by their curiosity.In addition,the feedback strategies they picked up in the process helped them remain happy in the participation.Similarly,as it was an anonymous activity,the ‘receivers' group's curiosity helped them gradually replace the painful feelings of ‘face-losing' with happy participation.As for changes in participating attitude,nearly all the ‘givers' group members(despite their language competence and writing quality of their peers),accumulated much experience in how to give feedback and developed relevant strategies;thus they became more active in the activity.On the other hand,the ‘receivers' group's attitude seemed to depend on the number of feedback they got and their own language competence.The more feedback they got and the more competent the students were in English,the more active they seemed to be in the activity.As to the effectiveness,both groups considered the peer feedback activities as most helpful in improving their writing in content and organization.Secondly,the interviews after the study showed that in the ‘receivers' group,most of the students improved their sense of readers and the awareness of possible mistakes,while in the ‘givers' group,only those who had a better command of English would take the readers and possible mistakes into account after participating in the peer feedback activity.Moreover,by comparing the pre-and post-writing test scores,the study found that both groups made significant improvement in their writing.The ‘receivers' group achieved obvious improvement in all five aspects(content,organization,language,vocabulary and mechanics)while the ‘givers' group improved all but the aspect of mechanics,which may have to do with the low peer pressure and their teachers focus on error correction.This finding is different from related literature about students with different roles achieve similar improvement in all five aspects,Besides,by comparing the increase rate of two groups' writing test scores in each aspect,we found the ‘receivers' group had much bigger improvement in language and vocabulary,while the ‘givers' group had more improvement in content and organization.Based on the findings,suggestions were drawn on how to better design and implement the peer feedback activities in senior high schools,with the hope to improve the English teaching in writing.