The Effects Of Oral And Written Peer Feedback On Language Accuracy In Chinese College Students’ English Writing

This thesis is designed to investigate the effects of oral and written peer feedbackon language accuracy in Chinese college students’ English writing. The study wascarried out by using both quantitative and qualitative approaches. A total of61sophomore students who major in business English in Shandong Foreign TradeVocational College participated in the study and four peer feedback sessions werecarried out during one semester. The participants were randomly divided into twogroups, with one group receiving oral peer feedback and the other group receivingwritten peer feedback. A pretest administered before the study shows that there is nosignificant difference in the participants’ writing accuracy. In each peer feedbacksession which lasted about four weeks, both groups were required to write the firstdraft, and receive comments from their partners before writing the second draft basedon their partners’ comments.By comparing each group’s scores in the pretest and the posttest and the twogroups’ scores in the posttest, it is found that:(1) both oral and written peer feedbackcan significantly improve the students’ writing accuracy.(2) It needs further researchto decide which type of peer feedback is more effective in improving students’ writingcorrectness.(3) Participants of both groups are able to make correct comments, amajority of which are accepted in their peers’ revisions.This thesis is composed of five parts. First, a general introduction of thebackground and objectives of the study is presented. The second chapter presents thedefinition of peer feedback, its theoretical basis and the relevant empirical studies.Chapter three is concerned with the design of the experiment, which includes thedescription of the research questions, participants, and the procedure of theexperiment. The next chapter presents the results of the experiment together with a discussion of the results. In the last chapter, the findings, implications and limitationsas well as suggestions for future studies are given.