An Action Research Of Peer Review In English Writing Instruction Of Senior High School

As an important part of writing instruction, feedback on students’ writings has attracted attention of teachers as well as researchers. In traditional writing instruction, teachers’role is just assigning tasks and then marking their works; and students are in a passive position to complete the writings assigned and receive marks. However, in process-oriented writing, students take more active part in the whole process, especially when engaged in reviewing each others’ works. It has to be mentioned that teachers’ scaffolding guidance plays a significant role during this process. While reviewing peers’ compositions, students can also reflect on their own problems in writing structure, content, language and so on, thus achieving progress together.As an action research, this study attempted to explore the effects of peer review on students’ abilities of reviewing compositions and their writing performance. The research was carried out in one class of a senior high school in Nanjing and lasted four months in two action periods. In the first action period the researcher diagnosed problems, mobilized students and trained them in marking methods; assigned peer review tasks; some preliminary effects were achieved. In the second action period, more teacher scaffolding was provided in evaluating standards (in aspects of the content, organization, language, etc.). In order to examine the effects of peer review, the researcher collected data before, during and after the research and then analyzed them both quantitatively and qualitatively. The changes in the participants’ writing-reviewing abilities were evaluated in terms of content, methods and effectiveness; the improvement of the participants’ writing performance was assessed by comparing the mean score of their first and last compositions, and 20 participants’ compositions were further compared in accuracy, fluency and complexity. All the quantitative comparisons were subjected to the significance-level test by SPSS 16.0.The results show that there are significant improvements, firstly, in students’ abilities of reviewing English writings, being able to use more effective and various methods and to give feedback on more comprehensive aspects, especially paying more attention to the content rather than the language only. And secondly, the students’ English writing performance has also been improved, being able to write to express ideas more fluently and effectively and use language forms more accurately though no significant change was found on linguistic complexity, which needs further researching.