A Study On The Effects Of Teacher And Peer Feedback In College English Writing

Writing is one of the most important language skills. However, the writing instruction in China is far from satisfactory. In this condition, some researchers and teachers have introduced some foreign popular theories on writing. And there is a trend that the traditional writing instruction, product approach, is being replaced by process approach to writing. Feedback of writing is a very important part of process approach. And it is a focus of these relevant studies. Feedback is composed of teacher feedback and peer feedback. In ESL (English as a Second Language) context, there have been many studies on the effects of teacher feedback and peer feedback. Nevertheless, the results of them varied greatly in these studies. Some of their findings are even contradictory to each other. But there have been a few studies on them in China. The author believes that it is quite necessary to carry out a research to probe the actual effects of them in EFL writing in Chinese-context. So three questions of this research are as follows:(1) How do students deal with teacher feedback and peer feedback when revising their compositions after the first drafts?(2) Is feedback effective in improving students'writing? If yes, to what extent do teacher feedback and peer feedback cause effects on students'writing respectively?(3) What are students'attitudes towards teacher feedback and peer feedback?To answer these three questions, two questionnaires and an experiment were conducted.Research subjects are non-English majors of two classes in Chongqing University. They are sophomores and are learning English in the third semester. 85 students of these two classes were divided into two groups---EG (experimental group) and CG (control group). During this experiment, peer feedback training was given to EG for they had no idea what the peer feedback activity was. Then, all students did three writing tasks in which teacher feedback and peer feedback were practiced respectively. In addition, the research instruments of this experiment are a questionnaire survey, the first drafts, the final drafts and the checklists, the pre-test and post-test writing. All the data were analyzed by SPSS16.0.The results of this study are: (1) Students do incorporate either teacher feedback or peer feedback when they revise their compositions. (2) Feedback plays an important role and is effective in improving students'writing. However, the effects of teacher feedback and peer feedback are different in students'writing. First, more teacher feedback is incorporated than peer feedback and the gap of students'writing proficiency in teacher feedback class is reduced more. Second, peer feedback leads to a higher percentage of successful revisions and self revisions, although the teacher gave more possible feedback points. (3) Students hold positive attitudes towards both teacher feedback and peer feedback.In summary, peer feedback is effective even in China where great authority is given to the teacher. Therefore, peer feedback can be adopted with teacher feedback in writing instruction to improve students'writing ability.