A Study Of Peer Feedback In The EFL Writing Class

Peer feedback activity in writing class, as the supplementary to teacher feedback, is strongly recommended by many teachers and researchers abroad. But there are few empirical studies in this area of research in China.The purpose of this study is to explore a group of participants'learning experiences with peer feedback in a college English writing class at a university in east China, aiming to describe and understand their beliefs in relation to peer feedback, their focuses in peer feedback activity, as well as the effects on writing and their beliefs of writing. Qualitative study method has been employed to collect and analyze the data from the participants'drafts and an end-of- course interview. SPSS (13.0) has also been used to analyze the answers from the questionnaire. The major findings of the study are summarized as follows:1. Most of the participants thought highly of the peer feedback activity, 74.1% of them believed that their peers could evaluate their writing appropriately, and 74.1% believed that it could reduce their errors in grammar and vocabulary, 77.4% believed that it could improve content and 58% believed it could also improve organization aspect of their writing;2. The participants'feedback mainly focused on grammar and vocabulary aspects of the writing, which occupied 77.3% of the total revisions; and 16.1% content, 6.6% organization, which were obviously different from the participants'beliefs; and some of the participants made comments on their peers'handwriting. On receiving the peer feedback, the participants accepted the feedback which were clear and concrete, but just neglected the ones that were vague or difficult to follow because they either contributed to the feedback givers'misunderstanding of their original meaning or they considered it troublesome to revise them;3. The analysis of the revisions based on the peer feedback revealed that the participants'second drafts were obviously better than their first drafts in terms of grammar and vocabulary, slight improvement in content and organization, and some improvement on handwriting as well; 68.5% of the participants accepted the obvious grammatical or wording revision suggestions, but did not completely accept the suggestions on content and organization. The participants also believed that they benefited from the peer feedback activity, realizing that giving feedback to others was also a type of learning. And they felt the peer feedback activity made them more confident in English writing.Based on the above findings, the researcher made some suggestions to improve the college English writing instruction.