Effects Of Peer Feedback On Senior High School Students' English Writing Accuracy

Writing is one of the most important means of human communication.It can effectively promote language acquisition in the process of second language learning However,students always make plenty of mistakes in their compositions,and it is also a hard job for teachers to improve students'writing accuracy.With the prevalence of the Process Writing Theory in the 1970s,many researchers regarded feedback as an indispensable part of the writing process and began to explore the effects of feedback on reducing the errors in students'compositions.Feedback has many forms,mainly including teacher feedback and peer feedbackFrom the researches on feedback in ESL environment,it can be clearly seen that teacher feedback is still more popular than peer feedback in the writing class,while the advantages of peer feedback are often underestimated.Besides,the subjects of the researches on feedback are mainly college students,while few researchers pay attention to investigating senior high school students' writing accuracy.Therefore,this research attempts to explore the effects of peer feedback on senior high school students'writing accuracy and answers the following questions:1).What kind of errors do senior high school students usually make in their writings?2).What effects does peer feedback have on senior high school students'writing accuracy?3).What are students'attitudes toward peer feedback on improving their writing accuracy?In order to answer the questions mentioned above,the author conducted a one-semester investigation.First of all,we chose 80 students with the similar level from two classes as subjects in Bai Zehu middle school,which is located in Anqing,Anhui province,calculating the number of the errors in students' compositions by means of pre-test and post-test to testify students' writing accuracy.Students in the two classes received different feedback:in the control class,the teacher corrected the compositions,while in the experimental class,students evaluated and revised the compositions.The obtained data were put into SPSS16.0 for analysis to make conclusions.Besides,two questionnaires were designed to testify students' attitudes toward peer feedback on improving their writing accuracy.The experimental results were shown as followsFirst of all,students made plenty of mistakes in their compositions before the research,among which modal verb,capital and sentence errors were most common errors,which indicated that students' writing accuracy needed to be improved urgentlyAdditionally,both peer feedback and teacher feedback could improve students'writing accuracy.However,peer feedback was more effective in reducing students'lexical and sentence errorsWhat's more,most of the students preferred teacher feedback to peer feedback before the experiment.However,after the experiment,most of them took positive attitudes toward peer feedback and regarded peer feedback as an effective method to improve their writing accuracy.Besides,the improvement of the writing accuracy aroused students'interest in learning English,and they were more enthusiastic about English writing,...