A Study On Chinese EFL Learners'Incorporation Of Peer Feedback

Peer feedback is widely applied in writing instruction,but with regard to its effectiveness,different researchers have different views.In order to investigate the effects of peer feedback on the revision of drafts and students' attitudes towards it,30 Chinese English-major sophomores from a southern 211-Project Universities were selected as the participants of the research.Through the analyses of their first and second drafts and the checklists for peer review,combined with the data from the questionnaire and interviews,the thesis aims to address these three research questions:(1)Does peer feedback have positive impacts on students' writing quality?(2)What factors influence student writers' incorporation of peer feedback?(3)What are students' attitudes toward peer feedback?Data collection consisted of the total number of suggestions and valid suggestions offered by student reviewers in terms of language and content,together with the total number of suggestions taken up and valid suggestions taken up in the second drafts.In addition,lexical complexity,syntactic complexity,fluency and accuracy between the first drafts and the second drafts were also compared.In the end,a survey and pair interviews were conducted to ascertain the students' attitudes towards peer feedback.It is found that:(1)The proportion of valid suggestions offered by the student reviewers was 66.74%.The taken-up rate of valid suggestions incorporated by student writers was 61.93%.Moreover,the comparison between the first drafts and the second drafts demonstrated that the second drafts were of higher quality in terms of lexical complexity,syntactic complexity,and accuracy.As a whole,peer feedback contributes to the improvement of writing quality.(2)Students' incorporation of peer feedback is not significantly correlated with the writing ability,but related with the number of the peer suggestions and the quality of suggestions,both of which are also significantly correlated with the reviewers' writing proficiency.(3)As shown in the analyses of the questionnaire and interviews,more than 85%of students approve the value of peer feedback and would like to incorporate them into revisions.Lastly,the paper suggests that while conducting peer review,teachers should effectively organize and instruct students to ensure they are clear about the focus,methods and techniques of peer feedback so as to improve the effectiveness of peer feedback and develop students' learning autonomy.