A Comparative Study On Effects Of Peer And Self Feedback On Senior High School Students' Writing Proficiency

Since many empirical studies were carried out to investigate the effects of peer feedback and self feedback on college students' or undergraduates' writing proficiency,few studies have explored the effects of peer feedback and self feedback on senior high school students' writing proficiency.Therefore,the present study aims to examine how peer feedback and self feedback affect senior high school students' English writing proficiency,including content,organization,language use,vocabulary and mechanics of students' compositions.Besides,the study is supported by three theories,namely,the comprehensible output hypothesis,the cooperative learning theory and zone of proximal development.The participants in the present study consist of 100 students from two intact classes in Qin'an Secondary High School,Gansu,with Class 4 receiving peer feedback instruction and Class 5 self feedback instruction.The present study consists of pre-test,the training session,the experiment session and post-test.At the beginning of the study,students are asked to write a letter,besides,the author collects their scores of English in the High School Entrance Examination.Students in peer feedback group and self feedback group receive different training.The training of peer feedback group includes instruction,practice,teacher-student conference and discussions.For students in self feedback group,the training mainly is the self-monitoring technique and three-step procedure.And students in two groups receive the same writing tasks.In the experiment session,the students both in peer and self feedback groups write seven letters in total.After students write the first draft,peer feedback group exchanges the compositions with their peers and revises,and self feedback group revises their own compositions.All students revise compositions based on Jacobs et al's composition profile,and score the compositions.Besides,they fill in the profile.At the end of the study,all students are required to write a letter as the post-test.These scores are analyzed by SPSS 22.0.The results of the present study are as follows.Firstly,both peer and self feedback group improve their general writing proficiency in the post-test.Besides,the general writing proficiency of the peer feedback group is higher than self feedback group,that is,peer feedback is more effective than self feedback in terms of students' general writing proficiency.Secondly,peer feedback is more effective in content,organization and language use of students' compositions,while self feedback is more effective in vocabulary and mechanics.Thirdly,although students are positive to the effects of peer and self feedback,they show conservative attitudes towards the implement of peer and self feedback in class.The study has some pedagogical implications.First,because peer feedback and self feedback can improve students' writing proficiency,the teachers should apply peer feedback and self feedback activities to the English writing class.Second,peer feedback and self feedback are beneficial to the content,organization,language use,vocabulary and mechanics respectively,thus it is proposed that the teachers conduct peer feedback and self feedback activities with specific purposes.There are some limitations in the study.First of all,the participants in the study are intermediate and low level students,the results and findings are not generalizable to higher level students.Secondly,the study doesn't interview students when the experiment is over.Therefore,some reasons for the results and findings can't be clearly understood.Thirdly,in the process of data analysis,the study doesn't analyze students' 7writing tasks finished in the experiment session,and only analyzes the compositions written in the pre-and post-test,which doesn't contribute to further understanding of the writing and feedback process.