A Study Of The Impact Of Peer Revision On EFL Learners' Writing Ability

The peer revision group in which learners respond to one another's writing is commonly used in LI and ESL writing classrooms. Yet many English writing instructors and English learners in China still seem not to be very familiar with this activity, and few empirical studies have investigated the impact of a collaborative revision-based method in the foreign language context. Many college English teachers find marking students' writing essays to be a tedious and unrewarding chore. While it is a crucial aspect of writing process, teachers' diligent attention and careful comments seem to bring about very few improvements in their students' subsequent work. How can EFL writing instructors aid their students in promoting writing ability through marking their students' essays? This thesis puts forward an alternative way of marking students' writing essays, that is, responding to them through peer revision. Vygotsky's developmental theory of ZPD and its related scaffolding metaphor serve as the theoretical basis for the present research.The purpose of the research is to investigate the impact of peer revision on EFL learners' writing development. Three questions were addressed: 1) Are Chinese EFL learners capable of effectively participating in peer revision activity? 2) Does the activity of peer revision influence Chinese EFL learners' perception of writing and revision? 3) Can EFL learners who engage in peer revision activity produce better quality writing, compared with learners who either receive only a teacher's feedback or follow traditional writing pedagogy?The present research involved three groups of college-level learners of English, whose writing essays were treated differently in terms of ways of giving feedback. For the experimental group, students' writing essays were discussed through peer revision session; for the two control groups, both of them received the teacher's feedback, but Control Group 1 were required to revise their essays after they got their essays back from their teacher, while Control Group 2, which followed the traditional writing approach, were not required to do that. The experiment lasted...