A Study On The Application Of Peer Assessment To English Writing Teaching In Senior High School

Peer assessment,as a means of process writing approach,is widely applied in writing teaching in English-speaking countries,but it has not been popularized in the foreign language teaching in our country due to some existing issues.Therefore,this research tries to apply peer assessment to high school English writing teaching process and aims to explore the peer assessment-based writing teaching model.It is hoped that it can improve our country's English writing teaching and promote students' writing ability,and provide some reference for high school English teachers to implement peer assessment in their teaching process.This research takes zone of proximal development theory,constructivism theory as well as cooperative learning theory as theoretical foundation.Based on the previous studies,this research attempts to apply peer assessment to high school English writing teaching process and aims to explore its feasibility and effectiveness.The research questions are as follows:1)What are senior high school students' attitudes to peer assessment in English writing teaching process?2)What are the effects of peer assessment on improving senior high school students' English writing ability?3)What factors influence the effectiveness of peer assessment in English writing?The subjects are 66 students from two parallel classes,Class 1 and Class 2 in Grade two at the author's senior high school.Class 1 is the experimental class(EC),32 students and Class 2 is the control class(CC),34 students.And the research instruments include questionnaire,pre-test and post-test and interview.The research results show that most senior high students hold positive attitudes toward peer assessment.Besides,peer assessment teaching method is helpful for senior high students to enhance and improve their English writing ability.After a semester's experiment,the students adopting peer assessment model improve better in English writing than those in control class.This research has some implications for English teaching in senior high school.It proves that peer assessment teaching model is an effective supplement to traditional teaching methods,enhancing students' subjective initiative fully,decreasing students' dependence on teachers' assessment,and developing students' abilities of cooperation and autonomic learning.It is true that the effectiveness of peer assessment is influenced by such factors as the traditional teaching philosophy,the subjective consciousness of the teachers and the way of classroom organization.The author thus hopes that these problems will be corrected and improved in the future relative studies in order to realize its potentials.