The Impact Of Training On Peer Feedback In Oral Tasks

Peer feedback is widely considered to be beneficial to the improvement of language learning for second language learners. But studies show that not all forms of peer feedback can help language learners, because some students might not know how to give feedback. It is regarded that training could help them understand the requirement of the tasks and provide useful skills to give effective feedback. However, most studies so far investigated how peer feedback affected language learning, while few explored whether training had effect on peer feedback and how training affected the quality of peer feedback. Among the studies that examined peer feedback, most focused on writing tasks and few were conducted in oral tasks.This study tries to explore the effect of training on the quality of peer feedback in oral tasks of Chinese EFL learners. The research questions are:whether training affects the quality of peer feedback in oral tasks; if yes, how does training affect the quality of peer feedback in oral tasks.The four participants are chosen from an ordinary middle school. They are high school students whose English proficiency is at intermediate level. In the first stage, the four students were asked to carry out a feedback task without any training. Then they were given instruction and practice. After the training, the students were asked to finish the task again.The findings are as follows. First, the training has positive effect on the quality of peer feedback. Students learned to shift their attention to the form of speech. Their comments became more specific, and they provided useful suggestions for revision. Second, some comments were still general and some students always pointed out merits rather than shortcomings. The cause might be that the training did not provide enough specific instruction and they did not want to offend their partners.The study implicates that training is necessary for peer feedback tasks and the instructors are advised to make the training more specific and practical.