A Study Of Peer Feedback In Efl Writing Classrooms

Nowadays many teachers have come to realize the advantages of the process approach, and have carried out many studies to examine the effectiveness of peer review. These studies include the effects of peer review versus teacher feedback, the cultural elements in learners'peer feedback activities, and Chinese ESL students' attitudes towards peer response group interaction. The present empirical study aims to study the respective benefits of peer feedback to givers and receivers by separating the feedback providing and receiving processes, which attempts to fill in the gap in the study of the benefits of feedback giving and receiving processes in the EFL context.Both the quantitative approach and the qualitative approach were applied in this study. The participants were divided into the experimental group (the feedback providing group) and the control group (the feedback receiving group). According to the data analysis, the researcher found:1) Generally, the participants of both the two groups as a whole have made significant progress in their writing.2) Compared with the receiver group, the giver group made more progress.When the author takes a closer look at the performance of students of different English proficiencies within each group, she finds:1) In the giver group, the participants of the lower and intermediate levels have made much greater improvement than the participants of the upper level.2) On the contrary, in the receiver group, the receivers of the upper level have improved much more than the receivers of the lower and intermediate levels.According to the interviews and the questionnaire survey, the givers of lower and intermediate levels benefit a great deal in terms of the organization and the content, while the receivers of the upper-level benefit greatly from revising grammatical errors according to the feedback provided in the sample essays.This study has several implications on EFL English teaching:1) It is highly necessary to incorporate peer review into, the writing classrooms, since overall the participants of the two groups as a whole improved in their writing after this experiment, and most of them have expressed their great interest in peer review.2) Since students of the upper-level language proficiency benefit from receiving feedback, while the lower and intermediate-level students benefit from giving it, when peer review activities are organized in class, students of different language proficiencies can be grouped together to achieve a win-win situation.3) Since only providing feedback or receiving it can also help learners improve their writing abilities, in writing classrooms, asking students to take these two kinds of exercises can also help them improve their writing, and it is an effective substitute for the authentic peer review activities.4) While giving teacher feedback, teachers should provide it according to the students'different levels of English proficiencies. For example, teachers can give more feedback on organization and content to the learners of the lower and intermediate levels, and more grammatical feedback to the learners of the upper level.Of course there are also some limitations to this research. For instance, because of the separation of the feedback giving and receiving processes, some problems concerning the authentic peer review activities have not been found, the limited number of the students of the upper proficiency level, and the relatively short time of this experiment.