Research On The Application Of Peer Review In The Teaching Of English Writing In Junior High Schools

As an important compulsory course for basic education in China,English teaching aims mainly at improving the students' basic linguistic skills: listening,speaking,reading and writing.Writing is a vital scale of measuring students' English proficiency.Evaluation is an important part of writing teaching,and it as always been concerned by many scholars.In the 1970 s,with the introduction of the process teaching method,peer review appeared as an important component.Peer review has also been named as peer feedback,peer response,peer review,etc.It's a writing teaching activity that students exchange reading compositions and make suggestions for revision.In Chinese previous researches,researchers are mainly committed peer review to higher education groups.Thus,there are relatively few studies on the application of peer review among junior high school students.Based on Cooperative Learning Theory,Zone of Proximal Development Theory and Interactive Hypothesis theory,this study has adopted quantitative and qualitative analysis methods.Besides,by means of teaching experiment,questionnaire survey and interview,this study has chosen the English compositions from 96 students of two parallel classes in grade eight as the research object.During the experiment on writing evaluation,class one has been randomly selected as an experimental class,peer review method is adopted to evaluate the students' writings;while the class two has been a control class,using a traditional teacher review method.The experiment has been conducted for 16 weeks,aiming to find the answers of the following three questions:(1)Can peer review help improve students' writing skills? If it can,what are the specific aspects?(2)What impact does peer review have on students with different writing levels?(3)What are the student's attitudes towards peer review?Research results show that:(1)Peer review can effectively improve students' English writing score,improvement can be found in the following aspects: text content,language expression and text structure.Among them,the progresses in text content and text structure are more obvious,but the effect on language expression is not clear.(2)Peer review has different effects on students in high,middle and low levels.In terms of overall writing,students in the low-level segment make the greatest progresses,followed by the middle-level segment,and lastly the high-level segment;in terms of language expression,the changes of students in the low-level segment have been most obvious;subsequently,the high-level segment and finally the middle-level segment.(3)After 16 weeks of teaching experiments,students have positive attitudes towards peer review.Peer review is feasible to English writing teaching for junior high school students.However,junior high school students are insufficient in various aspects and they never have strong self-control,so teachers must play a role both as an organizer and a supervisor in the process of peer review.