Reflective Effects On The Reviewer In College English Peer Review Process

Peer review is an important process in writing instruction,which has already aroused increasing research interest.A modest number of studies indicate that peer review is effective and is an efficient source of feedback additional to teacher feedback,which is helpful to promote students' writing qualities.Nonetheless,when it comes to the studies on peer review,most former researches tend to investigate its effectiveness from the perspective of feedback receivers,ignoring students' roles as reviewers and the reflective effects on them during the process of peer review.To fill the research gap,the present study was administered to investigate the reflective effects of reviewing peers' drafts on reviewers' own writing abilities through the research methods of survey and text analysis.The study was carried out in Xi'an International Studies University,with thirty non-English majors(sophomore)as participants.Through analyzing the data of questionnaires,participants' writing drafts and reflection journals,the study drew the following three conclusions.First,due to the lack of English proficiency,reviewers were more prone to providing feedback on grammar,lexicon and sentence structure rather than that on content and organization during the process of peer review.Second,reviewing peers' drafts was indeed beneficial to improving reviewers' own writing abilities,which was mainly manifested in the aspects of the decreasing number of grammar mistakes and the increasing use of collocations and sentence patterns in the post-test.Third,by analyzing the participants' reflection journals on the peer review experience,it was found that all of them recognized the improvements they made and reflective learning ability cultivated through reviewing peers' drafts.