Action Research On Peer Feedback To Improve English Writing Ability Of High School Students

Writing is one of the four basic skills in language learning. Both teachers andsenior students usually pay a lot of attention to English writing, as it is always animportant and difficult part in English language teaching and testing. In the process ofteaching, the author finds that students have great difficulty in writing concerning thelack of genre knowledge and adequate writing strategies, poor grasp of basic languageknowledge, the negative influence from the native language writing, etc. At the sametime, the students can only receive teacher feedback. Therefore, it is necessary toexplore a more effective way to improve senior students’ writing ability.In this thesis, the author introduces peer feedback, group assessment plus teacherfeedback in senior English-writing class aiming to test its effectiveness.Two parallelclasses in senior3are involved in the research, which lasts8months.The results indicate that most students show positive attitude towards peerfeedback. However, for those who are of low proficiency in English, peer feedbackdoes not work well.Peer feedback will be of more efficiency if it is integrated with the teacherfeedback.Most students agree that the peer feedback does improve their writing to someextent especially in content and structure. But in grammatical correction, teacherfeedback is more welcomed by the students. Thus, peer feedback cannot go wellwithout teacher feedback.The author has also found that peer feedback has aroused students interest inwriting, helping students improve self-evaluation and develop their writing skills andstrategies. Self-confidence in English writing and the ability of cooperative learningare also developed.The research has applied a method that can strengthen the effectiveness of writingclass in senior school and will shed light on future research on English writingfeedback.The research has its limitations and leaves some questions for further explorationowing to the constraint of time and other factors.