A Study On The Effects Of "Teacher + Peer" Feedback On Senior High School Students’ English Writing Ability

Writing is one of four basic skills,listening,speaking,reading,and writing,in the English language ability.It reflects students’ comprehensive language proficiency.Feedback is an indispensable factor in the improvement of students’ writing ability.The research of second language writing attaches importance to the value of feedback because effective feedback helps students realize their strengths and weaknesses in the process of writing.Although numerous researches have examined the effectiveness of teacher feedback or peer feedback in promoting students’ writing ability,however,there is still a large space to investigate improving students’ writing ability efficiently in real school contexts.Based on process writing theory,cooperative theory,and activity theory,this study integrates the advantages of teacher feedback and peer feedback.The study attempts to answer the following questions:(1)What is the students’ attitude towards “teacher + peer” feedback?(2)Does the “teacher + peer” feedback improve students’ English writing ability? If so,how does it improve students’ English writing ability?To answer the above research questions,an experiment that lasted 12 weeks was conducted on 104 students from two classes in the second year of senior high school by combining qualitative and quantitative methods.52 students of class 10 as the experiment class(EC)who adopt “teacher + peer” feedback and 52 students of class 14 as the control class(CC)who adopt teacher feedback only in the English writing course.EC and CC were provided different feedback treatments and then the revisions they made in their drafts were compared in terms of content,language,and organization.A total of 832 essay drafts including the second drafts and third drafts of four writing tasks(not including the first writing task and the sixth writing task)were collected.At the end of the experiment,the quantitative data of the pre-questionnaire and post-questionnaire and the qualitative data from the semi-structured interview in EC were collected to investigate students’ attitudes toward “teacher + peer” feedback.Additionally,the quantitative data of the students’ scores on pre-test and post-test in EC and CC were analyzed from content,language,and organization aspect to answer the second question.The findings revealed that(1)students hold a positive attitude towards the“teacher + peer” feedback.They are willing to discuss and communicate the problems in their compositions with peers.Furthermore,they expect to continue to use the“teacher + peer” feedback in the future;(2)“teacher + peer” feedback has a good effect on students’ writing ability.First of all,the overall composition scores of the experimental class have improved after adopting “teacher + peer” feedback,but the control class didn’t.Secondly,the average scores of the content and language aspects of the composition have promoted after the experiment.The content of the composition has been enriched and the accuracy of that has been improved.The experiment also has bright implications for the feedback on the writing teaching.Firstly,Feedback in the classroom should be well prepared;Secondly,the teacher should determine the roles of teachers and students in the feedback activities;Finally,grouping should make sure that students are at different levels of language proficiency.