Impact Of Commenting On Peer Feedback Upon Writing Proficiency

Peer feedback, one type of feedback during process-oriented approach, has attracted the focus of many researchers or scholars at home and abroad, and the relevant researches indicated that peer feedback quality was not satisfying; therefore, how to improve peer feedback quality becomes the problem to be addressed. However, currently there is few research about the issue of how to improve peer feedback quality in the writing process. The study designs to monitor peer feedback quality through commenting on peer feedback and to explore the impact of commenting on peer feedback upon writing proficiency in the intermediate writing course for English majors in an foreign language university through experiment, text analysis and questionnaire. During the experiment, the participants are 60 English majors of two classes(thirty for control group and experimental group respectively) and complete eight writing tasks in total among which the first and final ones are selected for contrast analysis. By the end of the experiment, the questionnaire is distributed to the experimental group for attitude survey. The relevant data show that commenting on peer feedback can improve both peer feedback quality and learners’ writing proficiency, which is obvious in language, content, strucuture, and grammar and mechanics; in addition, learners hold positive attitudes towards commenting on peer feedback, believing that commenting on peer feedback could be useful for mastering commenting standards, improving peer feedback quality, etc., which provides theoretical and pedagogical implications for the issue of how to improve peer feedback quality in current English writing teaching research and practice in China.