The Effectiveness Of Guided Peer Feedback On English Writing In Senior School

Writing is an important component in English teaching,which reflects students' integrated language capability.However,the present situation of students' writing in senior school is not satisfactory,especially the work of evaluation and revision in writing.English teachers tend to spend much time and energy revising students' compositions,but the effects are not obvious.In fact,effective model of evaluation and revision will play a key role in arousing students' writing interest and increasing writing performance.With writing teaching approach shifting from product-oriented to process-oriented,peer feedback,which is centered around the learners,has come into widespread use in writing,becoming a hot issue in English writing teaching.In order to apply peer feedback into writing teaching more effectively,optimize the traditional feedback model and facilitate the teaching effects,this thesis is intended to explore the following questions:1.What different aspects do students focus on when they conduct peer feedback under the teacher's guidance?2.What different effects does guided peer feedback have on students' writing performance?3.What are the students' attitudes towards guided peer feedback?This research is conducted in a senior school in Jiangsu province and the subjects come from two parallel classes,each class having 32 students.The experiment class adopts the model of peer feedback under the teacher's guidance,namely,guided peer feedback,while the control class uses the model of peer feedback without teacher's guidance,that is,unguided peer feedback.The data collected from the questionnaires,writing drafts,the feedback checklist,two tests and the interview is analyzed by Excel and SPSS 17.0.The major findings are presented as follows.1.The students in experiment class are more active to participate in the work of evaluation and revision,finding out more feedback points than control class.Not only do they find more superficial-level feedback(language expressions),but they also have an awareness to pay more attention to the deep-level feedback(content & organization)than control class.Besides,the feedback points they find out are more usable and accurate than control class.All these are closely related to pre-training,the teacher's guidance and the help of a feedback checklist.2.Students in experiment class make obvious progress in revision after conducting guided peer feedback.The improvement between the first draft and the second draft indicates that guided peer feedback has a more positive effect on students' writing performance.By comparing pre-test and post-test,we can see the students under guided peer feedback make more advance than those under unguided peer feedback,which proves that teacher's guidance indeed plays a vital role in the experiment.3.After the experiment,the majority of the students in experiment class have a more positive attitude towards guided peer feedback and hold the view that pre-training,the teacher's guidance and the feedback checklist are very important in the implementation of peer feedback,which function as the scaffolding,helping students improve their ability of evaluation and revision.Finally,some pedagogical implications and suggestions are put forward.Guided peer feedback,as an optimized peer feedback model,can arouse students' initiative,cultivate their critical thinking and autonomous learning ability,enhance their self-revision ability and further improve the quality of their writings.In view of students' different evaluation abilities,the teachers are advised to provide different instructions for them to reduce the difficulty of evaluation and revision.Limitations of this research and suggestions for further study are also provided.