| English writing is a significant component of college English teaching and it is an important reflection of the comprehensive English level of students.Feedback plays an important role in English writing teaching.In particular,peer feedback has been proved effective in many writing contexts.According to Wikipedia,peer feedback is defined as a practice in language education,in which one student provides another student with feedback.Peer feedback in writing refers to a writing practice where students read peers' writings and supply peers with advice for revision by grouping or pairing(Mangelsdorf,1992).Theoretically,the practice of peer feedback is strongly supported by Scaffolding,Zone of Proximal Development(ZPD)and Situated Learning Theory,in that by providing feedback for peers,learners help each other in their respective ZPDs in the learning community.This kind of collaborative learning is recognized as a very facilitating activity in learning.Previous studies of peer feedback have focused on the comparison between the effects of peer feedback and those of other feedback modes.Nevertheless,few studies have been conducted on the effects of peer feedback on the revision of writings from the perspective of the psychological features of feedback.This thesis explores the effects of peer feedback on the revision of English argumentative writings by 30 non-English majors.The study intends to answer the following three questions:(1)What are the types and distribution of peer feedback comments in the data?(2)How are different types of peer feedback comments implemented in revision?(3)How does comment implementation influence the improvement of writing revision?Data in this study come from a college English class of 40 non-English majors using an online writing system Peerceptiv.Students mainly finished 3 tasks in this study: they wrote the first draft,reviewed 3-4 peer writings and revised their own writings after receiving peer feedback.After collecting all these data,a decision was made to look into only the writings with 4 reviews as the majority of writings received 4 reviews.Therefore,the final data in this study are 30 writings of Draft 1,all the comments and ratings from peers,and 30 writings of Draft 2.Before coding,the comments were segmented according to idea units,producing a total of 1316 idea units.In coding the idea units,the revised coding scheme based on that proposed by Patchan and Schunn in 2015 was taken as the analytical framework.The focus of this study is on the psychological features of feedback which fall into two kinds: criticism and praise.The thesis adopted the quantitative analysis as the main research method and combined the qualitative analysis to analyze the coded peer feedback comments.The findings of the study are(1)Criticism comments were distributed more frequently than praise comments.Among criticism comments,the most and least frequent comments were comments on identifying the problem and summarization.Between praise comments,pure praise comments were distributed more frequently than praise+criticism comments.In general,low writers received more comments(62.9%)than high writers(37.1%).(2)The overall implementation rate of the implementable peer feedback comments reached 54.6%.Among them,the most and least implemented comments were comments on offering a solution and praise+criticism comments respectively.In consistency with the distribution of the amount of comments among the pairing groups,the largest percentage of feedback implemented was by low writers who received the largest amount of comments from higher reviewers(50.3%).In total,about 70% of comments from high reviewers were implemented.(3)Although the improvement rate(0.92%)isn't high,the implementation of peer feedback comments still has positive effects on the improvement of students' writing performance,especially comments on identifying the problem,localization and offering a solution.The findings reveal that more comments tend to lead to more implementation and more implementation tends to lead to more improvement in revision.However,as most of implemented peer feedback comments are comments on form instead of content,the language accuracy of writing is improved but the macro level of writing such as the content,structure and main idea of writing are not improved greatly,resulting in an overall low improvement rate of writing performance.This implies that,for peer feedback to be more effective,students need to be guided to focus more on content issues in providing feedback.This study only focuses on the effects of peer feedback on the writers in terms of writing revision.Therefore,the reviewers' benefit from this practice is unknown.In addition,this is a descriptive rather than an intervention study.Future research can be conducted by manipulating more factors such as the pairing mode so as to produce better effects. |
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