A Research On The Effectiveness Of Peer Review In English Writing Teaching In Senior Three

“Writing” is an important form of language output,which can represent a language learner's ability of language output and integrated linguistic competence.It is also one of the main purposes of language learning.In the development of senior high school students' integrated linguistic competence,English writing is not only helpful to consolidate the input of language materials through “reading” and “listening”,promote the internalization of language knowledge,improve the accuracy of language use,but also helps to lay a solid foundation for students' ability to express orally.Evaluation is a main part of writing teaching,which aims to help students improve their writing ability.At present,teacher evaluation is basically the only method in evaluating the writing of Senior Three students in English writing teaching.The teacher is the authority on student' writing,and the writing feedback that students can get after their writing usually comes from the teacher.However,the findings of some studies show that the disadvantages of teacher evaluation are becoming more and more obvious.Therefore,it has become a hot topic to explore other evaluation methods to assist teachers' evaluation in English writing teaching.Thus,the author tried to apply peer review to English writing teaching in Senior Three through an empirical research,aiming to solve the following three problems: 1)Does peer review help to promote Senior Three students' motivation of English writing and reduce their writing anxiety alike? If yes,the effects are obvious or not? 2)Does peer review contribute to the improvement of Senior Three students' ability of English writing? If yes,is the improvement obvious? What kind of writing abilities are improved significantly? 3)Does peer review help Senior Three students reduce their language errors in their English writing? If yes,what kind of errors are the main ones?An experiment was carried out for one semester.Senior Three students of two parallel classes of Arts taught by the author were selected as participants,whose writing competence is of no significant differences and who have a certain foundation of writing.Among them,Class 23 of Senior Three is the experimental class and Class 22 of Senior Three is the control class.In the experimental class,the author combined peer review with teacher evaluation to give feedback during the writing evaluation process.That is to say,students evaluated the first draft compositions of their peers through group discussion,pointed out the main problems existing in the compositions and put forward suggestions for revision.Then students modified their own compositions according to the suggestions from their peers and completed the revised draft.After that,the teacher evaluated the revised students' drafts,marking out the main problems existing in the composition with red marks and giving suggestions for improvement.At last,students revised the composition according to the teacher's feedback and completed the final draft.In the control class,the traditional teacher's evaluation was applied for giving students feedback.The teacher gave centralized feedback in class after evaluating students' first draft,the students then revised their compositions according to the teacher's feedback and completed their revised draft.After that,the teacher evaluated students' revised draft,marked out the main problems in the compositions with red marks,and put forward suggestions for revision.Finally,students revised the composition according to the teacher's feedback and completed the final draft.Before and after the teaching experiment,questionnaire survey and writing tests were conducted in the experimental class and the control class respectively,and also five students from different levels from the experimental class are randomly selected and interviewed.After the experiment,the data from the questionnaire survey,the results from the writing tests,the language errors in the students' pretest and post-test compositions and the results from the interview were analyzed.The results show that while peer review can significantly improve the external motivation of English writing of Senior Three students,it has no significant effect on their internal motivation.It also can significantly reduce the English writing anxiety of Senior Three students.Besides,peer review can significantly improve not only the overall English writing proficiency of Senior Three students,but also their accuracy,complexity and coherence of language.Among the students from different levels,the improvement of the students from the medium level and the low level is more significant.Furthermore,peer review can help Senior Three students reduce their errorsin their writing,including the ones in preposition,noun,spelling and article.At last,the author expounds the implications of this study for senior English teaching.