The Application Of Peer Feedback To The Teaching Of Writing For English Majors In Vocational Colleges

Writing is an important language skill that language learners should acquire,which can comprehensively show the learners’language proficiency compared withother basic skills (listening, speaking, and reading). Therefore, much importanceshould be attached to the teaching and learning of English writing. However, theteaching of English writing in China tends to be a thankless job. Teachers in writingclasses usually suffer from the burdensome tasks of lecturing and revising, while forChinese vocational college students, English writing is always the weakest part intheir English learning and many problems occurred during their English writing. To acertain extent, this current situation can be traced back to the prevailing of thetraditional product-oriented approach in English writing teaching that assumes writingas a linear process, in which there is no students’interaction within writing activities.On the contrary, the process-oriented approach assumes writing as a cognitive processwhich is overlapping and complicated, with students active participation in writingactivities. In recent years, the process-oriented approach has been thriving in Englishwriting teaching. Peer feedback, an indispensable part of process approach to writing,has drawn more and more attention in the educational world. However, the research inEnglish writing in China is still not fully developed. It is necessary to discuss peerfeedback in EFL writing in greater depth so that the findings will help Chineseteachers employ peer feedback in more effective ways. In order to promote the currentwriting teaching and research, the researcher of this thesis carried out the empiricalstudy to explore the students’attitudes toward peer feedback, the effectiveness of peerfeedback in improving students’English writing proficiency, students’focus duringpeer feedback activities, and the suggestions they offered to the continuous adoptionof peer feedback in English writing teaching in vocational colleges.The participants involved in this research are second year students majoring inBusiness English from two separate classes (the size being 29, respectively) ofShandong Provincial Institute of Trade Union Cadres and Management. All of theparticipants were instructed by the researcher and randomly assigned to the Experimental Class (EC) and Control Class (CC). During a 14-week of Englishwriting teaching, each student wrote four compositions. In control class studentsreceived the traditional teacher feedback and were required to make corrections basedon the teacher’s comments, while students in the experimental class received peerfeedback. SPSS 16.0 was used to analyze the data collected from this research,including those from the pre-test, post-test, questionnaire and interview.Based on the data collected, the following findings were made:Firstly, the majority of the participants in this research take a favorable attitudetowards the adoption of peer feedback in the teaching of Business English writing.Secondly, the major reasons why students like peer feedback are that peerfeedback help to improve their English writing proficiency as well as their revisionand cooperative abilities.Thirdly, when giving feedback to peer, students in the experimental class concernmost about the grammar and least about the organization, which is different from thefeedback points revised. The most peer feedback points revised are on mechanics andthe least are on content.Fourthly, the adoption of peer feedback has improved the English writingperformance of the students to a certain degree.Lastly, according to the interviews, even though the majority of the fiveinterviewees believe that teacher feedback is more trustworthy, three of them are infavor of peer feedback for its advantages.All in all, peer feedback has been proved popular with most students andeffective in promoting English writing learning in this research. However, itsshortcomings and limitations revealed can not be neglected. The pedagogicalimplications and recommendations for further research were also discussed in thisthesis.