The Effect And Improvement Of Peer Feedback In College English Writing

Peer feedback is an important embodiment of cooperative learning in writing teaching.Peer feedback has been found to have a significant effect on writing revision in English as a native language writing class.However,a series of empirical studies have found that the application of peer feedback in ESL writing classes met with great resistance.Especially for Chinese English learners,because of the relatively large difference between their mother tongue and English,they often do not have enough confidence to evaluate their peers’ English writing.As a result,Chinese English learners cannot provide adequate feed backs for their peers.Therefore,the following questions were studied in this paper.Firstly,whether peer feedback can improve both the quantity and quality of text revisions after students are trained to provide peer feedback.Although some have carried out comparative studies on teacher feedback and peer feedback in ESL or foreign language writing,no systematic comparative study has been found on teacher feedback and peer feedback with and without training.What are the differences and similarities between these three forms of feedback on text revisions? Secondly,at present,researches on the effectiveness of peer feedback mostly focus on the discussion of short-term application,that is,the influence on the revision quality of writing drafts.However,there are few empirical studies on the long-term application of peer feedback on the writing performance of English learners.Then,can peer feedback of long-term application be used as a reliable source for the revision of writing drafts as teacher feedback? Thirdly,Among the factors that may affect the application effect of peer feedback,what are the effects of students’ previous writing level and different grouping methods on the application effect of peer feedback?This paper took three academic years to test the effect of peer feedback in college English writing class and put forward a specific plan to improve the effect with three studies.The purpose of Study 1 was to investigate the influence of peer feedback on college students’ English writing revision.A time series design with two groups and multiple treatments was adopted to compare the effects of teacher feedback,untrained and trained peer feedback.The results show that: the follows: Firstly,in terms of feedback sources,the effect of peer feedback after training was similar to that of teacher feedback,both of which are significantly better than that of untrained peer feedback.Secondly,in terms of the type of feedback from the various feedback sources,feedback at the surface level had the best effect on the revision of students’ writing drafts.Thirdly,after receiving the training,most of the students were able to accept the feedback from their peers and found it helpful to revise their writings.These findings have two implications:（1）Peer feedback is effective for the revision of writing drafts.（2）It is necessary to train students how to be reviewer.This study extends the evidence for the advantage of peer feedback.The purpose of Study 2 is to investigate the long-term impact of peer feedback on students’ writing.It was between groups design of two conditions（teacher feedback and trained peer feedback）to investigate the influence of the dependent variables: writing competence,writing self-efficacy,writing self-regulation learning,and writing classroom experience.The results indicate that: after training,peer feedback and teacher feedback had similar effects on the improvement of writing level and writing self-efficacy;and meanwhile,the two groups had similar classroom experience,but peer feedback could lead to the significant enhancement of students’ autonomous motivation.This shows that it has a long-term influence on the improvement of students’ English writing ability.This study verified the feasibility of peer feedback.The purpose of the Study 3 is to investigate the effect of students’ previous writing level and different grouping methods on the application of peer feedback.Between groups design of 2（previous writing level: high or low）* 2（grouping method: homogeneous and heterogeneous）was used to investigate the influence of writing competence,writing self-efficacy,writing self-regulation learning,and writing classroom experience.The results show that in the use of peer feedback,the excellent students perceived better effect than the poor student writers in that the students with high writing ability improved greatly in writing ability and writing skill efficacy,and obtained stronger autonomous motivation.And the homogeneous grouping was better than the heterogeneous grouping in that students in homogeneous group improved their writing ability and got stronger autonomous motivation.To sum up,peer feedback has been further proved to be effective in the EFL writing teaching environment,but training is a necessary condition.After training,students could effectively revise the writing drafts,and at the same time,students’ writing competence,writing self-efficacy and autonomous motivation were significantly improved.When teachers apply peer feedback in English class,it should be taken into consideration that students with high-level language proficiency can also benefit,and students with similar writing proficiency should be arranged in the same feedback group to ensure the best effect of peer feedback.