A Study On The Impact Of Peer Review On Senior High School Students' English Writing Performance

Writing teaching has always been a challenging task for teachers.Among the writing researches at home and abroad,it was found that peer review,which is advocated as an alternative for teacher feedback for its effectiveness in writing practice by some researchers,has been a heated topic under discussion among researchers.After combing through the literature the author found that so far,most of the research findings have been derived from studies in tertiary education,and few researches have been conducted on the impact of peer review on learners' writing performance within the secondary school context.Therefore,this research attempts to explore peer review on secondary English writing teaching with the purpose of investigating whether peer review could improve students' writing performance or not,thereby hoping to put forward some constructive suggestions for English writing teaching in middle school based on the present research findings.Targeting at the senior high students in the middle school affiliated to Wuhan University,this study,lasting for 12 weeks,set an experimental class(N=41)and a control class(N=37)with almost the same English writing performance at the very beginning.And the following research questions are addressed in this study:(1)Can peer review improve students' writing performance?If so,to what extent their writing performance is improved?(2)In what aspects of writing does peer review help to improve students' writing performance?And how does peer review help to improve their writing performance?(3)What attitude do students have towards the application of peer review in EFL writing practice?To fulfill the purposes of this study,the quasi-experiment method,questionnaire and interview have been adopted.Through the paired samples T-test on students' writing performance before and after the study as well as the analysis on questionnaire and interview,the following conclusions can be drawn:(1)Peer review could improve students' writing performance.Moreover,their writing performance showed significant improvement;(2)Students' writing performance in the area of organization,language use and vocabulary showed significant improvement,while no improvement was perceived in content and mechanics.Meanwhile,it was found that peer review helped improve students' writing performance by directly or indirectly incorporating peer's comments into their second draft revision.(3)The majority of students held positive attitude toward peer review practice.Based on the research findings,some implications have been drawn from this study.Firstly,peer review does have its advantages in improving students' writing performance.Secondly,it is expected to use peer review to improve students' writing performance in organization,language use and vocabulary,while using teacher feedback to improve students' writing performance in content and mechanics.Thirdly,students' comments on peers' composition are encouraged to focus on the macro level to elicit more attempts in second draft revision.