A Study On The Effects Of Group Peer Feedback On English Writing Ability Of Senior High School Students

English writing is an important part in senior high school English teaching.English writing ability can be seen as one of the essential criterion to evaluate students' English learning.Due to applying the process method,group peer feedback begins to popularize in English teaching.More and more people have realized the importance of the participation of students in writing evaluation through peer feedback.However,there were few related studies on the effects of group peer feedback on writing ability of students with different language proficiency in senior high school.In this study,English writing ability is divided into five dimensions:content,organization,vocabulary,language use and mechanics.Based on the collaborative learning theory and output hypothesis theory,this thesis focuses on solving the following issues:1.Which dimensions of writing ability can be improved by group peer feedback?2.What level of students does group peer feedback have a significant impact on?3.How do students with different English proficiency consider group peer feedback in their writing process?There were two intact classes.An experimental class adopted group peer feedback methods in addition to teacher feedback,while the control class only received teacher feedback.Eighty students from senior two participated in this experiment.They all come from a senior high school in Shenzhen.This experiment lasted for 18 weeks.At the beginning of the experiment,pretest was conducted in both classes to examine whether the two classes were at the same language proficiency.Students were trained for group peer feedback in the second week.In addition,students in both classes took the posttest in the last week of this experiment to find out whether group peer feedback had positive effects in English writing.The experimental students were also asked to answer the questionnaire.The interview was conducted to 12 students,including 3 high-level,3 low-level and 6 middle-level students to further examine the perceptions of students to group peer feedback.All data was analyzed after the experiment.The main findings were summarized as follows:1.Group peer feedback contributed to the improvements of writing ability in global areas,especially the dimensions of content and organization.As for language use,it was improved in both experimental and control class.Therefore,we could conclude that it was teacher feedback which was concluded in both classes that contributed to the improvements in language use of local writing ability.2.Middle level and low level students made greater progress in peer feedback groups than high level students.Students with high language proficiency were inclined to believe in teachers.As for middle and low level students,they enjoyed working in groups with peer feedback.3.Most of the students who had different language proficiency held a positive attitude to group peer feedback.They could learn from reading peers'compositions and giving their comments.What most of them agree was that they could benefit a lot from group peer feedback.Group peer feedback is an effective pedagogical practice in English teaching.But taking all different levels of students into account,group peer feedback and teacher feedback should be combined properly in teaching English writing in senior high school.