A Study On The Effects Of Peer Feedback On Chinese Non-English Majors’ Writing

As an integreded part of writing instruction, peer feedback is commonly used in L1or ESL writingcourse. Yet many English teachers in China still seem not be familiar with this activity and few empiricalstudies have carried out to investigate the effectiveness of peer feedback in foreign language context. Howcan Chinese College English teachers help students to improve their writing abilities through providingfeedbacks for them? Based on the Collaborative learning theory, Process approach and Zone of ProximalDevelopment theory, the author addressed the following three questions:1. What are the attitudes of Chinese non-English majors towards peer feedback in their writing?2. To what extent do the Chinese non-English majors at different proficiency levels incorporate theirpeers’ feedbacks in revision?3. What are the effects of peers’ feedbacks on students’ writing?A total of44students from Northwest Normal University were involved in the present study. peerfeedback activity used “one draft, one focus”, each pass of the feedback activity focused only on aparticular aspect of the draft. The first pass of peer feedback concentrated on content. After the participantsfinished first drafts, their writings were discussed and commented on by their peers and then they modifytheir drafts on the basis of their peers’ feedbacks. Second pass of peer feedback concentrated onorganization, and the third pass concentrate on grammar and prose style. Students modified their draftsbased on the feedbacks that their peers provided until the final drafts came out.In order to investigate students’ attitudes towards peer feedback, the author used SPSS13.0and theresults showed that after the experiment, students attitudes changed significantly. After comparingstudent’s first draft with its final version, the author got the following results: peers’ feedbacks werevaluable, they provided100feedback points altogether, and80of them were reasonable. Students werefavor of their peers’ feedbacks and81%of the feedback points were adopted by students. And this data wasslightly different according to the students’ writing levels. The high achievers adopted65%, theintermediate and the lower achievers adopted71.4%and75.6%respectively.A comparison was made between the means of score in first draft and the final drafts and the resultsshowed that there were significant differences (p=0.000<.01). Student’s writing has improved significantly,and peer feedbacks helped a lot to improve the quality of studnets’ writing. The interview results showed that peer feedback activity brought many benefits to students. Such ashelped to foster a sense of ownership of the text, highlighted the sense of audience and they graduallyknow what made a good writing. They are more confident in writing.The above findings indicated that peer feedback were effective in helping improving students’ writing.It can be used as a complimentary method and introduced to English writing instruction.