The Effects Of Teacher Feedback And Peer Feedback On Students' English Writing In Junior School

Writing is one of the most important language skills as well as a crucial aspect in foreign language teaching,so many researchers and teachers have been constantly drawing on advanced theories overseas to improve students' writing ability.However,the effect of English writing teaching in China's rural areas is not ideal,such as a single form of teaching method and students' negative attitudes to writing.In the field of teaching English as a second language,there are some related studies on teacher feedback and peer feedback,therefore the author believes that it is necessary to further carry out a research to explore the effects of teacher feedback and peer feedback on students' English writing in junior school.The thesis is trying to answer the following three questions:(1)Can teacher feedback and peer feedback enhance students' English writing on content,organization and language?(2)What are the differences between teacher feedback and peer feedback in students' English writing?(3)What are the students' attitudes towards teacher feedback and peer feedback?This study involved 81 seventh-grade students of two parallel classes,from Xihe No.3 Junior School in Gansu province.The research instruments in this experiment include two tests(pre-test and post-test),peer feedback sheet and two questionnaires.In this research,3-month feedback training was carried out.The subjects finished four narrative writing tasks and each writing contains three drafts.Teacher and peers provided feedback on content,organization and language.Meanwhile,peer feedback class was required to fill in peer feedback sheets.Based on the feedback from teacher and peers,students rewrote their writing.Two questionnaires about teacher feedback and peer feedback were filled out after the experiment.The major findings of this thesis are as follows:(1)Comparing the scores of pre-test and post-test,the results clearly showed that teacher feedback and peer feedback are helpful to improve students' writing ability.Teacher feedback makes significant contributions for students' writing on content,organization and language,while peer feedback mainly helps students' writing make great progress on language.(2)The effects of teacher feedback and peer feedback are different in revising students' writing.First,teacher feedback not only pays much attention to students' mistakes on language form,but also focus on their problems on content and organization.However,peer feedback mainly focuses on the language mistakes in students' writing,such as spelling,the use of words and grammar errors in their writing.Second,comparing with the peer feedback,teacher feedback leads to a higher percentage of revisions and the gap of students' writing ability in teacher feedback class is reduced more.(3)Students held positive attitudestowards both teacher feedback and peer feedback,but they expressed the opinion that teacher feedback is more authoritative than peer feedback.At the same time,students' cooperative awareness has been promoted by the sharing and communication with others in writing.Therefore,for students at different writing levels,teacher feedback should be combined with peer feedback to improve students' writing ability.