A Study Of The Strategy Use And The Effectiveness Of Peer Feedback In College English Writing

During past three decades,researches on peer feedback have been booming to develop students' English writing ability.This thesis,established on the conceptual framework of Activity Theory and Process Writing Theory,is an empirical study of peer feedback in College English Writing Teaching.The research questions that guided the present study are:(1)What were the strategies students used in peer feedback process and how did the strategies impact the peer feedback process?(2)Is peer feedback effective in developing college students' English writing ability? If yes,how does it impact students' writing?(3)What is the focus of students' peer feedback?Lasting for 15 weeks,this study was implemented among 80 non-English major freshmen in Xi'an Fanyi University,with 40 students in Experimental Group(EG)and 40 in Control Group(CG).Questionnaire,writing tests,writing tasks,audio-recordings and an interview were used in this experiment.EG students received peer feedback training and conducted peer feedback in the whole experiment,while in CG,traditional teacher feedback was given.Paired samples t-tests and Independent samples t-tests on the scores of EG in the pre-test and post-test have been conducted respectively with SPSS 16.0.Besides,a group of four students identified as cooperative and efficient peer reviewers were selected to investigate their strategy use during peer feedback.The major findings are summarized as follows:(1)The group of collaborative and efficient EFL students adopted five major strategies in peer feedback: using L1(Mandarin Chinese),employing L2 writing criteria,adopting rules of group activity,seeking help from teachers and playing different roles;(2)Peer feedback is proved to be effective in improving college students' writing ability;students' writing ability was improved through reading and discussing fellow students' works and receiving valuable revisions from peers;(3)In doing peer feedback,students focused on grammar most,followed by vocabulary,mechanics,contents and organization.Finally,this thesis gives some pedagogical implications for college English writing teaching and puts forward suggestions for further study based on limitations of this thesis.