Peer Writing In English Writing Process

English writing is a very important means of English output and it also plays an important role for Chinese EFL learners for academic success. However, in our school, the situation of students’ English writing is worrying. Many students think writing is difficult and they don’t like it. What’s more, there are many errors in their writing. Although teachers spend a lot of time editing their compositions, the results is not satisfactory. Peer review, as an important method in the process approach, has received more and more attention in the field of teaching English writing. Therefore, this study tries to explore the possibility of applying peer review to teaching English writing to junior middle school students; more specially, it mainly attempts to find out whether peer review has effect on students’attitudes towards writing, and secondly, to what extent peer review can improve students’accuracy in writing.The study introduces the process writing theory and collaborative learning theory which support peer review and the related researches on peer review. Based on them, the research plan was designed. It chose36students in Grade Eight in No.6Middle School in Miyun as participants and proposed three research questions, that is, whether students can locate the language errors in their peers’ writings, whether peer review activity can help improve the writing accuracy, and whether peer review activity is helpful in changing students’ attitudes toward writing. The study analyses the data from the questionnaire, interview and students’writing samples. The Findings are as followed:1. During the peer review activity, students can locate most of language errors and give useful suggestions.2. Peer review activity can help improve language accuracy.3After the four-month peer review activities, the interest and confidence of students towards writing is enhanced and students enjoy writing in English more than before. The findings give us some reflections on our teaching:1. to make our writing class more attractive, productive and involve more students, we can adopt the peer review activity to teaching writing among middle school students.2. English writing class should be the student-centered class and teachers should assume new roles as facilitators to help students develop strategies for revising compositions.3. Although peer review activity has been proved useful, it should be combined with teacher feedback.At last, the study pints out the limitations of the research and provides space for future research.