The Relation Between Students’ Second Language Writing Ability And Peer Feedback Quality

Peer feedback is based on the process-oriented approach and dynamic assessment theory.Recently,peer feedback has attracted the interest of many researchers and scholars at home and abroad.Among previous studies,most studies have explored the effectiveness of peer feedback,the combination and contrast of teacher feedback and peer feedback,the combination and contrast of computer-assisted peer feedback and written feedback.However,few previous studies paid attention to the relation between students’ second language writing ability and peer feedback quality from dynamic assessment perspective.Less attention to the relation between second language writing ability and peer feedback quality results in unreasonable grouping and poor peer feedback effect,which in turn reduces the function of peer feedback in expanding learners’ ZPDs on peer feedback ability,learners’ self-assessment ability and their second language writing ability.Whereas there is no empirical research on this topic,this thesis uses experiment,text analysis,survey(including questionnaire and interview)to explore whether peer feedback training has an impact on peer feedback quality or not.Then it studies whether there is a relation between second language writing ability and peer feedback quality or not.Specifically,it studies whether those students who perform well in their second language writing could also perform well in providing peer feedback to their peers.It also investigates students’ attitudes toward peer feedback and peer feedback training.The subjects are 30 juniors of English majors who learn English as a foreign language at a university in the northwest region of China.The study conducted in Advanced Writing Courses and lasted for 18 weeks.Two assignments were selected from six assignments in order to do the co-relation analysis with SPSS 18.0 tools.The topics of assignments are Critical Review and Proposing a Solution.Results show that students’ second language writing ability has an impact on peer feedback quality,and there is a significant correlation between students’ writing ability and peer feedback quality.Specifically,the better students perform in their writing,the better they perform in providing peer feedback to their peers.In addition,most students expect that more feedback activities would be organized under peer feedback training by teachers to improve their comprehensive ability on “reading,writing and assessing”.This study has implications for English writing and English learning.Firstly,it reminds teachers that different-level students may provide different quality of peer feedback.Therefore,for more reasonable grouping and better quality of peer feedback,teachers should take students’ individual ability difference into consideration before grouping students.Secondly,it also facilitates students to develop their learning potential in ZPDs by collaborating and communicating with their peers.In summary,this thesis enlightens teachers and learners that peer feedback activity should not serve as an unidirectional and passive activity,but a mutual-beneficial activity to develop students reading,writing and evaluating ability,collaborative learning ability and critical thinking.