The Effect Of Peer Assessment On Linguistic Alignment In Senior High School’s Continuation Writing Task

The Senior High School English Curriculum Standards(2017 edition)explicitly states that the evaluation based on the core competence of English discipline should facilitate learning and teaching by assessment.However,as for the teaching of continuation writing in senior high school,the traditional teacher-led assessment hinders learners’full interaction with the provided texts and other students’continuations,which reduces the linguistic alignment,an important basis for evaluating the efficacy of continuation writing.Abundant research findings have proved that peer assessment,as a student-oriented evaluation method,has a positive impact on productive language skills.Therefore,this study aims to explore peer assessment’s influence on the continuation writing task and an appropriate approach to integrating both.For this purpose,an empirical study was carried out where 93 senior two students from one high school in Xiamen,Fujian Province,were selected as participants.They were randomly assigned to an experimental group(performing peer assessment)and a control group(performing teacher-led assessment).Operation differs among groups:learners in the experimental group in each continuation writing task first completed a draft and then carried out peer evaluation with the aid of evaluation feedback form and their English teacher.Having completed the second draft based on peers’feedback,learners would receive a final grade from the teacher.The learners in the control group,however,received the written feedback and writing grade directly from the teacher.A retrospective interview was later conducted for a closer inspection of participants’ opinions about the application of peer assessment and the influence of peer assessment on English learners at different levels.Based on the analysis of the experimental data and interview results,the following conclusions are drawn:(1)Peer assessment can significantly improve learners’attention to the language in the provided text,enhancing the linguistic similarity between students’ continuations and the preceding story at two levels:lexical and sentential.(2)The influence of peer assessment on the language output of English learners at different levels is significantly different:Learners at higher levels benefit more from peer assessment than those at lower levels.(3)Peer assessment can stimulate students’overall motivation and confidence in continuation writing tasks,resulting in their positive attitude towards it.The results of this research indicate that peer assessment is an effective approach to improve continuation writing,which can enhance the interaction between learners and the provided text or other learners’ continuations,eliciting learners to use and produce words and sentence structures in line with the input text.Given this,teachers are able to combine implicit language forms with explicit assessment content,giving learners clearer instructions on their learning tasks,helping students internalize the evaluation standard of continuation writing,improving the interaction intensity of reading and writing,and thus reinforcing linguistic alignment.