An Experimental Study Of Peer Feedback To Junior English Writing Teaching

In recent years,peer feedback applied in second language writing has caught increasing attention from researchers both at home and abroad.Second language learners can benefit from peer feedback both as feedback reviewers and receivers to some degree.Nevertheless,few studies have been conducted on the effect of peer feedback on Chinese students in junior high schools.Based on the related studies on peer feedback from home and abroad,the present study aims to explore the effect of peer feedback on English writing proficiency for Chinese students in junior high school.An experiment of two forms of feedback were carried out among two parallel classes,through conducting a questionnaire survey,a pre-test and a post-test and an interview,the author has the following findings:(1)Most junior high school students in the research held a positive attitude towards peer feedback and its related activities.On one hand,both reviewer and receiver can benefit from the process of peer feedback;on the other hand,students also have concerns of the validity of their peers’ feedback.Nevertheless,there are students who proposed that the repeated verification process makes the writer and reviewers to deepen understanding of the knowledge.(2)Through the comparison and analysis of the writings’ average score in the pre-test and the post-test,it can be found that after twelve weeks of training in writing,two types of feedback both can improve students’ English writing proficiency to some extent.(3)By analyzing the experimental data,the author found that after twelve weeks of receiving feedback in different ways,the experimental class with peer feedback narrowed the writing achievement gap.However,the control class’ s gap generally remained unchanged.The author suggests that teachers should adopt the peer feedback as a supplement teaching method in the English classes of junior high school.In that case,peer feedback can serve more effective learning environment for EFL writers.Then,students will show more interest in English writing and improve their English writing proficiency.