Action Research On The Application Of Peer Review In Senior High School English Continuation Writing Teaching

English writing teaching is of vital importance in senior high school English teaching.As a new English writing task,continuation writing is an important part in senior high school English writing.New and effective ways of conducting continuation writing evaluation need to be explored.Teaching evaluation is a significant part of teaching process.Effective and reasonable teaching evaluation can bring wash-back effect on English teaching.However,in the past,teacher evaluation is the most common way of evaluation,which is relatively single and boring.Under the guidance of this way,students just receive teachers’ evaluation passively and they may lose interests and confidence in their study.It is not beneficial to the improvement of students’ writing ability either.In the National English Curriculum Standards for General High School,it is emphasized that students need to play the principal role in the evaluation of teaching and learning,and teachers should care about the overall development of students.Therefore,as an evaluation method,which calls on the interaction among students,peer review can promote communication and cooperation and help students learn from each other.It can make students become masters of their own learning.It is possible that applying peer review into continuation writing teaching can improve students’ attitude towards continuation writing and their continuation writing ability.After fully investigating relevant researches concerning peer review and continuation writing,this action research was carried out.It was based on Language Input Hypothesis,Language Output Hypothesis,Cooperative Learning Theory and the theory of “Zone of Proximal Development”.Fifty-two Grade Two students of a senior high school in Liaocheng participated in this study.This study applied peer review into continuation writing teaching and aimed to explore the following two research questions:(1)What effects does peer review have on senior high school students’ attitude towards continuation writing?(2)What effects does peer review have on senior high school students’ English continuation writing ability?Based on these two research questions,three rounds of action research were conducted.After the preparing stage,each round of action research takes four steps:planning-implementation-observation-refection.During the action research,teacher’s logs and students’ logs were finished in order to find out the existing problems and to make adjustments to the action plan.In this way,the mode of peer review can be improved.After three rounds of action research,reflection and summaries were made.The post-test was carried out to analyze the changes of students’ scores before and after the research,which could reflect peer review’s influence on students’ continuation writing ability.A questionnaire survey was conducted again to find out the changes of students’ attitude toward continuation writing task.Besides,interviews were carried out to further explore students’ attitude toward peer review and continuation writing task.Based on the analysis of the research data,the final results showed that: Firstly,peer review can improve students’ attitude toward continuation writing in terms of emotion,cognition and behavior.Secondly,peer review can improve students’ continuation writing ability in the aspects of content,structure and language.Therefore,peer review can be applied into continuation writing teaching in senior high school.Overall,certain results and findings have been achieved in this study.It explored a pattern of peer review specifically applied to continuation writing teaching.It is also proved that peer review can have beneficial effects on improving students’ attitude towards continuation writing and their continuation writing ability.In this way,the evaluation methods of continuation writing can be enriched.It overcomes the drawbacks of teacher evaluation and makes sure that students play the principal role of evaluation.Besides,this study also provides enlightenment and reference to relevant researchers and teachers.