Impacts Of Online And Offline Peer Review On College Students' English Writing:An Empirical Study

Peer review,as an essential teaching activity in process writing approach,is an important feedback method besides teacher feedback,because it can enhance learner' reader awareness,improve learners' recognition of their own strengths and weaknesses,and encourage cooperative learning.The use of peer review to promote students' writing has received more and more attention in foreign language teaching.With the application of internet-mediated communication in teaching,online peer review has been gradually applied to college writing classes.Compared with the traditional offline peer review,there is relatively little research on online peer review,and there are fewer studies comparing the effectiveness of the two modes of peer review.This study focuses on the impact of online and offline peer review on college students' English writing.The subjects are 36 students from two writing classes of a university in central China.The purpose of this study is to explore the differences of comments generated by two modes of peer review,how do these comments influence students later revisions,the differences in the impact of peer reviews on students' writing performance,and students' perceptions on the two modes of peer review.Based on process writing approach and cooperative learning theory,this study conducts an empirical study by using text analysis methods and questionnaire survey,and using SPSS 22.0 Statistic Software to analyze the data,the following conclusions are drawn:1)The offline peer review group generates more comments in total,and the number of revision-oriented comments is larger for this group as well.In terms of revisions,students in the offline peer review group make more revisions in total and the percentage of peer-influenced revisions is also bigger than the online peer review group.2)Both online and offline peer review have promoted students' English writing performance.Comparing the pre-test and post-test,it is found that students in the offline peer review group have made greater improvement,especially in writing structure,content and language.The online peer review group students have made a slight improvement,and the improvement is mainly on the writing structure and language.3)Both groups of students hold a positive attitude towards peer review,and the students in the offline peer review group have more favorable attitude toward peer review activity than online peer review group.The above conclusions show that both online and offline peer review have a positive effect on students' writing,while the offline peer review is more effective in promoting students' writing and more popular among students.In English writing class,teachers can try to combine the two modes of peer review.In view of the fact that the subjects of this study are only from one university,the number of participants is small,the writing course in this study only refers to practical English writing,thus the experimental results do not has generality.In future research,further improvement should be made in these areas.