Study On The Functions Of Trained Peer Feedback On The English Writing Of Chinese Non-English Majors

Since the late 1980s, as an indispensable part of the process writing approach, peer feedback has gained increasing attention in L1 and L2 class. The value of different kinds of feedback offered to the student writers has been reported in the literature, however, little is known about the functions of peer feedback on Chinese college English writing outcomes. On the basis of previous studies on peer feedback, the thesis designs an experimental study on the functions of trained peer feedback on Chinese non-English majors and is attempting an often-cited suggestion for successful peer feedback, which trains students to improve their English writing efficiency by participating in peer feedback activities. The participants involved in this experiment were 58 non-English majors (sophomores) from Jilin University. They were divided into two groups:the controlled group (CG) adopted the traditional teaching methods, that is, the teacher is the only one who gives comments the students received teacher's written feedback and was required to make specific corrections out of the class; while the experimental group (EG) was trained and informed of the evaluating criteria before participating in peer feedback and the writers received peer feedback in written forms through peer review sessions, which were held in small groups of three students. The experiment lasted 16weeks (from September, 2008 to January, 2009). During this period of time, each student wrote 5 compositions which were chosen from CET-4 papers in class. At the same time, a questionnaire and interviews were conducted to get further data. Findings of this thesis show that trained peer feedback is beneficial to Chinese college English writing in several aspects. Therefore, in practice, peer feedback can be used as a productive method in the Chinese college writing classroom, as it can help students solve many problems they encounter in the process of writing. This study offers very important theoretical instructions for English writing teaching and it will be useful to study the different aspects of the training program to determine the most useful activities for reaching desired outcomes on peer feedback.