A Comparative Study Of The Combination Of Peer Feedback With Teacher Feedback And The Single Teacher Feedback In Junior High School English Writing Instruction

Since the 1970s,the process writing approach has become popular all over the world.Many scholars have carried out researches and proved the effectiveness and value of this theory.At the same time,feedback working as an essential part of the process writing approach has gained more and more attention from the researchers.Teacher feedback is the most common way of feedback teachers adopt in their daily writing teaching.Indeed,it is an effective way to improve the competence of students’ writing.However,along with the development of the practice and the studies,the problems and weaknesses of the teacher feedback come to appear.Taking this into account,some scholars begin to explore another form of feedback,i.e the peer feedback.The foreign scholars have conducted many researches to investigate learners’ attitude towards peer feedback and the effect of the peer feedback.However,most of these studies are done in the ESL context.In recent years,more and more domestic researchers start their investigation of the peer feedback in order to check whether it is possible to use peer feedback in the EFL environment.No matter how different the contexts are from each other,most of these studies choose college students to be their subjects.Only a few scholars explore the effect of the peer feedback in the high school,not to mention the junior high school.Besides this,few experts explore the unique value of the mechanism of the combination of peer feedback with teacher feedback.So in this study,guiding by the former studies and findings,the writer chooses the junior high school students to be the participants and compares the effect of the combined feedback and the single teacher feedback,with the purpose of exploring the unique value of the peer feedback and letting it become an essential part of English writing instruction.The research questions are presented as follow:1).What are students’ attitudes about the peer feedback?Is there any change of them after the experiment?2).How does the peers’ feedback allocate compared with the teacher feedback?And how about the rationality and the utilization?3).What are the different effects of the combination of the peer feedback with the teacher feedback and the single teacher feedback on the content,structure,vocabulary and the grammar of students’ writing?The writer uses the questionnaire and interview to explore students’ attitude towards the peer feedback.Besides this,the writer collects and compares the first drafts and the second drafts of the students in order to investigate the allocation of the peer feedback and the teacher feedback and the utilization of these opinions.At last,the global scores and the analytic scores of the pre-test and post-test of the experimental group and control group are presented and compared in order to show the different effect of the two patterns.Via the experiment lasting for 8 weeks,we get several conclusions.Firstly,most of the students hold positive attitudes towards the peer feedback and they are willing to try it in their daily writing practice.Apart from this,students show more trust to the assessing competence of their own and their peers after the experiment.Secondly,both the teacher and the students pay more attention to the grammar part of the writing.At the same time,compared with the teacher,the students focus more on the content and vocabulary parts.The rationality and utilization of the peer feedback is relatively high.Thirdly,both the two patterns have positive effects on students’ writing.As for the influence on different parts,the combination of the peer feedback with the teacher feedback is more likely to help students make progress comprehensively compared with the single teacher feedback.In addition to these conclusions,the writer also finds that the peer feedback can arouse students’ interests and motivation of writing and stimulate more self-modifications.From the above findings,the writer puts forward that junior high school students hold positive attitudes towards peer feedback and they have the competence to conduct it.Meanwhile,the peer feedback has its own value and can become a supplementary of the teacher feedback.So the writer suggests that the teachers can combine the peer feedback with the teacher feedback in their daily writing instruction to help students make progress in their writing.