A Study On The Effects Of Peer Feedback On Junior High School Students’ Writing Scores And Learning Motivation

Writing,as one of the important forms of language output,can directly reflect students’ability of using language comprehensively,which plays an important role in English language learning.However,in current English teaching environment in junior high school,teachers usually overestimate the importance of their feedback on students’writing but ignore the positive effects of students’participation in writing feedback,which affects students’ interest and motivation in English writing as well as the writing performance.Hence,it is particularly important to improve current writing assessment and strengthen students’ writing proficiency.Peer feedback was introduced into English writing instruction in 1980s and it has drawn wide attention in the field of second-language education.Peer feedback refers to the teaching method in which learners evaluate peers’ draft and provide comments literally or through discussion.It emphasizes that students should undertake the role and responsibility of the teacher in writing instruction.This thesis aims to investigate the effects of peer feedback on the improvement of students’ writing performance and learning motivation by utilizing peer feedback in English teaching at Guangming New District Junior High School in Shenzhen.Pretest-posttest comparison group quasi-experimental design is adopted in this research.Two parallel classes containing 101 students at Guangming New District Experiment School in Shenzhen were randomly selected as research subject,in which the number of students in the experimental class and the control class were 50 and 51 respectively.Peer feedback was adopted in the experimental class while the control class followed traditional teacher feedback in English writing instruction.Triangulation was employed to combine quantitative research method and qualitative research method together in order to investigate the effectiveness of peer feedback in writing instruction and the influence of peer feedback on students’learning motivation.Quantitative research method mainly consists of experiment,tests and scale.Qualitative research method mainly refers to semi-structured interview.In this research,the performance of students in English writing was assessed based on the results from Guangming New District Unified Examination.And the learning motivation of students was evaluated through the Learning Motivation Scale for junior high school students.In post-experiment stage,twenty students from the experimental class were interviewed to collect their attitudes and suggestions on the implementation of peer feedback.Meanwhile,experimental data was analyzed by using descriptive statistics,Independent Samples t-Test and Paired Samples t-Tests embedded in SPSS 19.0,and qualitative information was analyzed by using NVivo 10.The research result shows that:1.Peer feedback contributes to students’ writing scores.The improvement is significant for medium-level students but not obvious for higher-level students and lower-level students.2.Peer feedback has positive influence on students’learning motivation,especially on students’ intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation.In detail,peer feedback enhances the communication and interaction between each student,activates students’enthusiasm for writing,encourages students to participate in the class,and eventually improves students’ writing ability.3.In addition,based on the issues appeared in the implementation of peer feedback,some feasible suggestions were provided by students.For example,the intervention of teacher,the arrangement of discussion time,the scheme of grouping,etc.Although few defects and limitations exist in this research,the potential of peer feedback in English writing instruction is worth further exploring.