An Empirical Study On The Effects Of Peer Review On Cohesive Devices In English Writing Of Senior High School Students

As a writing scoring standard in the New English Curriculum Criteria of Senior High School and important college English tests,cohesive devices have attracted more attention from teachers and students.It includes grammatical cohesive devices and lexical cohesive devices,which are the basis of realizing the meaning coherence of discourse.The teaching of English writing in China has always been based on the product-oriented approach,with the teacher playing the leading role.Under these circumstances,students’ writing level encounters a bottleneck,and urgent changes are needed.Peer review is guided by the theory of cooperative learning,which can reduce teachers’ pressure and burden and promote the positive interaction of students.Guided by cohesion theory,combined with cooperative learning theory and process writing approach,this study focuses on the following three issues:1.What is the accuracy and error correction rate of peer revisions based on cohesive devices in senior high school students’ English writing?2.How does peer review affect grammatical cohesive devices in senior high school students’ English writing?3.How does peer review affect lexical cohesive devices in senior high school students’ English writing?To figure out the above three questions,this study takes two natural classes of the third graders in a senior high school in Taizhou City as the research subject It comprehensively uses the research tools of writing test,cohesion classification coding table,and writing text to carry out a 12-week teaching experiment on 82 students in two classes.In the exp eriment,the experimental group(EG)received peer review,while the control group(CG)received teacher review.Through the systematic analysis of the data,the following conclusions are mainly drawn:1.The accuracy and error correction rate of students’ English writing based on cohesive devices have been improved after the experiment.Besides,students’ positive emotions have strengthened their recognition of peer review and have consolidated their understanding and application of cohesive devices.2.With peer review as the primary feedback method,grammatical cohesive devices in students’ English writing have increased,and the types tended to be diversified.The most frequently used one is the reference,followed by the conjunction,with little substitution and ellipsis.Besides,there is a noteworthy difference in the use of conjunctions between the EG and the CG.Compared with teacher review,peer review can help students enhance conjunctions’using and expand the scope of application.3.Students’ number of lexical cohesive devices in English writing has increased,with repetition accounting for the largest proportion.Moreover,there is a significant difference in the use of collocation between the EG and the CG.Compared with teacher review,peer review helps students use words richer and more flexible in writing.The research results show that peer review positively affects the use of cohesive devices in high school students’ English writing,especially for conjunction and collocation.Therefore,the peer review method based on cohesion theory has certain feasibility and guiding significance in high school English writing teaching.