An Investigation Into High School Students' Attitudes Towards Peer Feedback In EFL Writing Classroom

Since the 1980s,many researchers have found that peer feedback is of great value for improving students' writing competence.They claim that peer feedback can involve students in the teaching of English writing.By reading and correcting,students can find their writing mistakes and know how to improve their writing ability.It is found that peer feedback in English writing class symbolizes a learner-centered teaching method and it can actively encourage students to interact with their classmates.Unfortunately,most of these studies focus their subjects on university students,and they have ignored high school students.Therefore,it is necessary to investigate high school students' attitude towards peer feedback in English writing class.On the basis of the findings in the previous research on peer feedback abroad and home,this study examined the high school students' attitude towards peer feedback.120 second-year high school students from FengCheng No.2 middle school were invited to join this study.Before the study was initiated,the researcher divided students into high English proficiency group and low English proficiency group by a writing task.Then,the students were told what peer feedback was in English writing class and were asked to practice how to use peer feedback to improve their English writing.After that,the researcher attempted to find out the students' perceptions of peer feedback by sending them a questionnaire and conducting a semi-structured interview.When all the data were collected,they were carefully analyzed by the SPSS Version 17.0.The major findings of this study were summarized as follows:1.The high school students held a positive attitude towards peer feedback.Although some students disliked the current writing instruction,they still had a positive attitude towards peer feedback for composition revision.73.4% of the students in this study liked reading peers' writing,62.5% of the participants admitted that they liked peer feedback activity,and 60.8% of the participants thought that they benefited from reading peer's written comments.Comparatively speaking,most students show more interests in reading peers' writing than participating in peer feedback activity and reading peers' written comments.Meanwhile,most students claimed that peer feedback helped them improve their writing content,organization and language.2.There were some differences in attitudes towards peer feedback between the high English proficiency students and the low English proficiency students.In general,there was a significant difference in reading peers' writing and participating in peer review between the high English proficiency students and the low English proficiency students.However,there was no significant difference in their attitude towards the current situation of writing and revision and reading peers' written comments between the two groups of students.On the basis of the findings above,some pedagogical implications for the teaching of English writing were offered.In order to have a good effect of peer feedback on students' English writing,peer feedback activity should be held in three steps.First,teachers should raise students' awareness and interest of peer feedback at the very beginning and provide some training of peer feedback for all students.Secondly,when peer feedback activity is carried out,teachers should walk around and provide help to students.They should try to encourage students and create a relaxed atmosphere.Finally,when peer feedback is completed in class,students should be given some time to make reflection on the comments.By doing this,they can be expected to do better in the next peer feedback activity.