An Empirical Study Of The Effects Of Peer Feedback On High School Students' English Writing Ability

In recent years,as an important issue in process writing,peer feedback has drawn widespread attention from researchers at home and abroad.Current studies mainly focus on the effectiveness,acceptance,training and the contrastive study between peer feedback and teacher feedback.They merely pay attention to the relationship between peer feedback and the variables to describe language learners' proficiency,namely,complexity,accuracy and fluency(CAF).Therefore,the present thesis will probe into the effects of peer feedback on high school students' English writing ability with special focus on CAF.Based on the Interaction Approach,the thesis addresses the following three questions:(1)What effects will peer feedback have on the complexity of students' writing?(2)What effects will peer feedback have on the accuracy of students' writing?(3)What effects will peer feedback have on the fluency of students' writing?The researcher conducted a 16-week teaching experiment in a high school in Changsha,from which the research subjects of two classes come.The students in both classes had two writing classes together each two weeks,during which students in the experimental class(EC)received peer feedback while those in controlled class(CC)received self correction.After the experiment,some students from EC were chosenrandomly to receive an interview to test their attitude and understanding of peer feedback.At last,an analysis was conducted to test the effects of peer feedback on the complexity(syntactic complexity & lexical complexity),accuracy and fluency of students' writing.The major findings are as follows:(1)Peer feedback can effectively improve senior high school students' syntactical complexity in writing,but it seems to be little difference in students' lexical complexity in their writing.(2)Peer feedback can significantly facilitate high school students' accuracy in English writing.(3)High school students' fluency in English writing can be improved with or without peer feedback,but peer feedback can lead to better improvement.Finally,specific suggestions are put forward for high school English writing teaching and the cultivation of students' writing ability.It is hoped that this study will play a positive role in improving high school students' English writing ability.