| In recent years,with the promotion of student-centered learning and the process-writing approach,peer feedback has been prevailingly adopted by teachers around the world in second language writing instruction.But relative studies(1)lacked a comprehensive investigation on various pairing situations of peer feedback practices(Kamimura,2006);(2)tended to control language proficiency other than investigate its impact(Allen,2015);(3)frequently applied holistic scoring and lacked the assessment of different aspects of writing(Zhou,2013).Therefore,the present study aims to(1)conduct a relatively comprehensive investigation on various parings of peer feedback practices conducted by learners with different second language proficiencies;(2)take the degree of improvement as an evaluation criterion to explore and analyze the impact of second language proficiency on peer feedback based on the experimental outcomes(Allen,2015);(3)apply the objective measurements to examine the degree of improvement in different writing aspects achieved by learners with different second language proficiencies.By investigating the peer feedback in writing of Chinese non-English major students with different language proficiencies in regard to their applicable mode,aspect and degree of improvement,and perceptions,the results are expected to provide reference for teaching practices and scientific researches.Through the application of instruments including writing tasks,checklists,and interviews,an empirical study has been conducted in a class of 44 first-year non-English major graduate students of Wuhan University.All materials collected have been elaborately analyzed.Some major findings are summarized as follows:Firstly,by analyzing the process of peer feedback,it was found that in general,students of high and low language proficiency all showed a tendency to focus on surface-level changes.But different features of practicing had been detected.The low-proficient group focused on problems at syntactic level when providing feedback and tended to be more dependent on peers' opinions when incorporating feedback.As for the high-proficient group,students had consciously pointed out problems at textual level during the process of providing feedback even though they themselves were incapable of providing constructive suggestions for improvement.Also,they had shown more autonomy in incorporating peer feedback.Secondly,by investigating the outcomes of peer feedback,it can be claimed that the writings of students with various language proficiencies had achieved progress in general.However,it also showed that:a.the low-proficient students improved the most;b.the top-down mode of peer feedback turned to be the most efficient;c.peer feedback was most effective in promoting the development of accuracy.Thirdly,to examine the attitudes of the participants toward peer feedback,it was found that students of different language proficiencies all showed a positive attitude toward peer feedback.However,deficiencies and difficulties were confronted.It thus was requested to involve the teacher feedback as a reliable supplement.Overall,this study supports the claim that peer feedback is an effective instrument in the EFL(English as a Foreign Language)writing instruction for students of various language proficiencies.It can be concluded that by adopting a top-down peer feedback mode,the developmental requirement for low-proficient students can be adequately met.But the advanced requirement by the high-proficient students can hardly be satisfied though they can benefit from peer feedback in other aspects.Therefore,it is suggested that the traditional peer feedback based on mutual feedback between members in pairs or in groups should be modified to construct a new top-down peer feedback mode which is guided by the Process Writing Approach and the Collaborative Learning Approach.For example,high-proficient students are paired with low-proficient students to provide peer feedback to low-proficient students while their own writings receive feedback from teachers.This way,the resources of teachers and students of different language proficiencies can be made best use of to satisfy needs for students with various language proficiencies. |
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