Effect Of Peer Feedback On Accuracy,Fluency And Complexity Of High School Seniors' English Writing

Writing has been acknowledged as one of the most important parts in second language learning and teaching,as well as an indicator of a learner's general English proficiency.In the latest research about L2 writing,accuracy,fluency and complexity are used to evaluate a lean:ter,s competence in language production.Therefore,in L2 writing assessment,an increasing number of researchers pay attention to the aforementioned qualities.In the teaching of English writing to high school seniors,it is mainly the teachers' job to give feedback to students writing assignments and students9 dominant role in assessment tend to be neglected.When it comes to revising their own writing,students don't know how to revise s:ince they have almost no chance to communicate with their teacher when confusion arises.Additionally,it is hard for the students to have a thorough and comprehensive understanding of their own writing.Owing to the weak points of teacher-centered feedback model,some researchers propose peer feedback and regard it as an important part of the writing process.However,systematic researches concerming peer feedback's effect on accuracy,fluency and complexity of high school seniors' English writing have not been found.Through experiments and interviews,therefore,this research aims to explore the different impacts of the two feedback models on the accuracy,fluency and complexity of high school seniors9 writing in the hope of guiding our teaching practice.The accuracy measurements of students' L2 writing are error-free T-unit ratio(EFT/T),the ratio of total errors to T-units(E/T)and the ratio of error-free T-units' words to error-free T-units' words(WEFT/W);the fluency measurements of students' L2 writing are T-unit length(W/T),error-free T-unit length(WEFT/T)and clause length(W/C);the complexity measurements of students' L2 writing are T-unit complexity(C/T)and dependent clause complexity(DC/C).The research aims to explore the following four questions:1)What effects does peer feedback have on the accuracy of high school seniors'writing?2)What effects does peer feedback have on the fluency of high school seniors'writing?3)What effects does peer feedback have on the complexity of high school seniors'writing?4)What effects does peer feedback have on high school seniors' awareness of improving their writing's accuracy,fluency and complexity?My findings suggest:Firstly,compared with teacher's feedback,peer feedback can significantly improve the accuracy of high school seniors5 writing,particularly in terms of gramnar,lexicon and discourse cohesion.However,there is no obvious improvement in the accuracy with respect to content.Though feedback does increase the students5 awareness of accuracy in grammar,lexicon and discourse cohesion,their awareness of accuracy 1s not encouraged in terms of the content.Secondly,peer feedback has no apparent effect on improving the fluency of high school seniors' writing.Although experiments and interviews reveal that peer feedback does not have effect on developing students9 awareness of fluency,it is noteworthy that the reasons why the two classes with different feedback models do not improve their fluency are quite different.The students in the class with only teacher's feedback regard writing as a process of literary translation without paying attention to the cohesion in context and the fluency in content.By contrast,the students in peer feedback class think complexity outweighs fluency.Therefore,when writing more complicated sentences they give priority to grammatical accuracy at the price of the fluency in content.Thirdly,as a whole peer feedback has no effect on improving the complexity of high school seniors' writing,but there is no doubt that peer feedback raises the students'awareness of writing complexity.During the writing process,the students do not neglect complexity in order to improve accuracy.There are two reasons why peer feedback has no effect cm improving the complexity of high school seniors' writing:one is that the students misunderstand the complexity of writing,mistaking the composition 's total number of sentences for the total number of T-units,and the other is that the complexity of the writing is unlikely to be improved within only three month,which is closely associated with individual's language proficiency as well as the frequency of revising.Therefore,it is suggested that during the writing process high school teachers can apply the peer feedback method to improve the accuracy,fluency and complexity of students' writing by providing appropriate supervision and guidance.However,the teachers ought to guide the students to assess the composition comprehensively in terms of accuracy,fluency and complexity,and prevent the students from achieving complexity at the price of fluency.