A Comparative Study Of Effects Of Face-to-face And On-line Peer Review On College Students' EFL Writing

Our country's college English writing teaching generally adopts the traditional writing teaching method.Teachers teach writing skills and methods in the classroom,and then review students' writing after the class.For a long time,it has been the only source for students to obtain feedback on their writing.There are many drawbacks in this single directional review.On one hand,due to the large number of students in each class,it is difficult for teachers to evaluate all the students' composition,and provide timely feedback.On the other hand,it is not a rare phenomenon that students do not modify their composition according to teachers' comments.Peer review has been practiced in Chinese college English writing teaching,and has brought considerable benefits.Since peer review is student-centered,it emphasizes the continuous revision between students and teacher,students and students.It can fully mobilize the autonomy and enthusiasm of students,stimulate interest,and emphasize the principal role of students,which forms a supplement to the one-way feedback of teachers.With the rapid development of computer science and internet technology,the world has entered digital era.Computer has been introduced into English writing teaching with the appearance of on-line peer review as one of its latest application reforms in writing teaching.However,compared with the traditional teachers' review and face-to-face review,domestic research on this new peer review modes is few.Comparative study of different modes of peer review is even fewer.By implementing on-line peer review and face-to-face peer review in a college English writing class,this study combined quantitative and qualitative research methods adopted questionnaire and semi-structured interview as research instruments and conducted a comparative study of the two peer review modes.On the basis of data analysis,this study explored the effects of on-line peer review and face-to-face peer review on improving students' writing abilities,the strengths and features of the two modes,students' as well as teachers' attitudes to them and students' response to peers' comment.It is found that both face-to-face peer review and on-line peer review have a positive effect on students' writing.By comparing the scores of pretest and post-test,it is found that the writing ability of students from both peer review modes is improved.Comparatively speaking,the on-line peer review group has better performance in the exit test.The results of questionnaire and interview also indicated that most students participated in the study hold positive attitudes towards the two modes of peer review.Although students could feel pressure at the beginning when reviewing peers' essays,this pressure disappears as their confidence increases when their comments are accepted by their peers.Students in on-line peer review group are more willing to accept their peers' feedback than students in face-to-face peer review group with a higher adoption rate of comments.However,both modes have less number of comments at macro level accepted by their peers since such kind of comments might lead to substantial changes in their writing which are not preferred by them.It has to be noted that each of the two peer review modes has its own advantages.In the process of on-line peer reviewing,the support of computer helps reduce students' anxiety in reviewing their peers' essay.Therefore,there are more comments produced by the on-line peer review group.The main advantage of on-line peer review is that the time and place for making comments are more flexible.The communication between peers is not necessarily synchronical.This distance in the sense of time and space also reduces the psychological pressure caused by face-to-face review thus it may lead to more comments produced by students.The digital feedback in on-line peer review,which comply with college students' learning habit who were born in a digital age,can inspire student's learning interest.Without the restriction of paper and pen,students feel they can put as much comments as they want when doing it on-line.This extra free writing exercise happened in this process is also beneficial to their English writing learning.However,technological problems and non-restricted reviewing time could make on-line peer review more time-consuming.The main advantage of face-to-face peer assessment is that students can communicate face-to-face to avoid misunderstandings.Thus students in the FFPR Group produced more macro comments on structure or content of their peers' essay than the OLPR Group whereas those in the OLPR Group are more inclined to make micro comments like spelling,grammar or technical details.Moreover,different focuses of the two peer review modes can also be found in the distribution of comment types.Students in the OLPR Group tend to modify their companion's drafts more directly,while those in the FFPR Group prefer to evaluate peer's writing.It is worth noting that the comments of both groups are mainly of revision-oriented nature with OLPR Group larger percentage.Much of this difference is caused by the large number of modification comments made by OLPR Group.Teachers' attitude towards both modes of peer review is supportive.As a new type of teaching approach,peer review can not only reduce teachers' working load in reviewing but also make the classroom atmosphere more active.Therefore,teachers are willing to accept peer review.However,if teachers are lack of experience in applying peer review in their classes,it will not achieve effective result.Although comparatively speaking,OLPR is easier to monitor than FFPR,in the process of implementation,some technical problems of computer and internet may also create a challenge for some teachers.Based on the summary of the research results,this study proposed some suggestions for the implementation of on-line peer review and face-to-face peer review in college English writing teaching.First,with the continuous innovation of educational concepts and teaching methods,on-line peer review has become a new type of teaching model and curriculum assessment form,with its superior interactivity,timely feedback,and effectiveness.It can be adopted by most college English writing classes,or in combination with face-to-face peer review depending on the specific situation of students and teaching tasks to enhance students' writing ability effectively.Second,before the implementation of peer review a training for students to have a better understanding of the rationale,principle,criteria and procedure is quite necessary.In this way,students' anxiety on this new learning method may be eliminated,and students can actively take over responsibilities in learning process.In addition,a complete,specific and detailed requirement on peer review activity should be offered to the students for them to follow,which may ensure the effective implementation of it.Last but not the least,on-line peer review demands a higher requirement on teachers.Therefore,the training for teachers is very necessary which may include but limited to theory introduction,teaching method,class observation on on-line peer review.In such way,teacher's role of guidance and supervision can be realized to effectively organize on-line peer review activity in order to enhance the effect and efficiency of English writing teaching.This study explored the attitude and response of non-English major undergraduate students on on-line peer review and face-to-face peer review on the theoretical basis of process writing theory and cooperative learning theory,and generalized the characteristics of the two peer review modes.This research results have certain positive effects on enriching process writing theory and cooperative learning theory and have practical significance to improve college' English writing teaching.