同伴反馈在大学英语写作中的运用研究

论文总字数：36620字

摘 要

本研究旨在归纳同伴反馈在英语写作教学中可行性和有效性的基础上，提出几点中国大学英语写作教学方面的建议。研究表明：学生对同伴反馈持积极肯定的态度；学生具备评价他人作文的能力；同伴反馈使提供反馈的学生在写作水平上有了明显的进步；同伴反馈使得提供反馈的学生能更好地修改自己的作文。基于以上结论，笔者提出如下教学方面的建议：1) 培训学生，使其能提供更有效的同伴反馈；2) 严密设计同伴反馈的过程和步骤；3） 建立易于操作的评分标准；4）将同伴反馈和教师反馈有效地结合 。同伴反馈在中国大学英语写作教学中有着积极的意义。

关键词：英语写作；同伴反馈；教师反馈

Contents

1. Introduction 1

2. Literature Review 1

2.1 Definition of Feedback and Peer Feedback 1

2.2 Theoretical Bases 2

2.3 Studies of Peer Feedback in Writing 4

3. The Feasibility and Effectiveness of Peer Feedback 5

3.1 The Feasibility of Peer Feedback 5

3.2. The Effectiveness of Peer Feedback 7

4. Pedagogical Implications for College English Writing Instruction 10

4.1 Training Students to be Effective Peer Reviewers 10

4.2 Designing Peer Feedback with Care 11

4.3 Establishing Operational Scoring Criteria 12

4.4 Combining Peer Feedback with Teacher Feedback 13

5. Conclusion 13

Works Cited 15

1. Introduction

EFL Writing as one of the most important language skills has been receiving more and more attention worldwide. How to improve Chinese students’ English writing proficiency remains a difficult job for experts and English teachers.

Product approach has long been dominant in the traditional teaching of writing. Usually the teachers spend a lot of time evaluating and informing students’ types of error. To teachers, it is too much work involved in the reading of students’ writing after class and too low efficiency is achieved. To students, who spend a lot of time practicing writing, the effect is not always satisfactory. What’s more, students cannot fully understand their teachers’ comments, and they cannot incorporate teacher feedback properly, thus the Chinese students’ writing proficiency has not been improved significantly.

Under such circumstances, various methods have been adopted in English writing instruction, including the “process approach”, which attaches more importance to the writing process. Writing becomes a multiple-draft issue, and students have more autonomy. Peer feedback as one of its approaches, has been widely used in EFL writing instruction. This paper aims to provide several teaching suggestions for Chinese college English writing instruction by using effective peer feedback.

The thesis is made up of five parts. The first part briefly introduces the background and significance of this thesis. The second part mainly presents the definitions, theoretical bases, and previous studies. The third part mainly discusses the feasibility and effectiveness of peer feedback. The forth part presents four pedagogical suggestions. The last part is the conclusion of the whole thesis.

1. Literature Review

2.1 Definition of Feedback and Peer Feedback

The term “feedback” has various kinds of meaning. In the area of teaching and learning, feedback is referred to numerous names such as response, review, correction, evaluation or comment. In an organizational context, feedback is referred to the information sent to an entity (individual or a group), who may adjust its current and future behavior to achieve the desired result. A more clarifying description of feedback in the writing was given by Keh, who pointed out that feedback is “…input from a reader to a writer with the effect of offering information to the writer to revise” (Keh, 1990:294). A reader gives the comments, corrections, or suggestions to a writer to help revise their writing.

As identified by Keh, there are three types of feedback in the teaching field, namely, peer feedback, teacher feedback and conferences feedback. Commonly, comments given by peers are called peer feedback. It means that peer feedback is a practice where feedback is provided from one student to the other in language education. In a writing course, after the learners accomplish a writing task, the instructor conduct two students work in pairs to examine each other’s work and give comments to the peer partner. Corrections, opinions, suggestions and ideas to each other are the mainly forms of peer feedback. Thus, peer feedback is a two-way process in which one cooperates with another. Peer feedback is to allow students learn how to judge others’ writing and find mistakes or inadequacy and then to overcome the weak point in their own writing. Peer feedback is an activity that learners receive feedback from other students, or their peers in the revising stage of writing. Typically students work in pairs or small groups, read each other’s compositions and ask questions or give suggestions.

2.2 Theoretical Bases

2.2.1 Zone of Proximal Development

The “Zone of Proximal Development” (ZPD) (Vygotsky, 1978:33) provides a theoretical basis to support the application of peer feedback in the writing instruction. The ZPD is referred to the gap between the actual development levels decided by solving problem independently and the higher level of potential development decided by solving problem collaboratively with more capable peers. The learner’s ZPD is defined as the place where learners are able to perform a task with the help of classmates versus with the help of a teacher or parent.

Vygotsky (1978: 38) pointed out that writing skills can be improved by mutual help among peers. Individual’s ZPD can be developed with peers’ assistance, and peer feedback just fit in. The ZPD theory also suggests that learners could potentially facilitate the development of their acquisition.

2.2.2 Collaborative Learning

Collaborative learning is a set work that two or more persons learn something together. Different from the individual learning, people engaged in collaborative learning on each other’s resources and skills (such as asking each other for information, evaluating each other’s ideas, monitoring each other’s work, and so on.). Collaborative learning is commonly illustrated when learners work together in order to hunt for understanding, meaning, or solutions, which is a very effective way of encouraging learners to acquire languages.

Mutual modifications within learners will promote language acquisition, provide comprehensible language input and complete self-revision according to the collaborative learning theory. Peer feedback, as a form of collaborative learning, offers a good opportunity to learners to share problems, to exchange information and acquire languages. Learners often face difficulties in the process of learning, whereas the teachers are always distant from the difficulties that learners are facing. This may explain why teacher feedback is not adequate. In contrast, peer feedback is more accessible, which provides learners with opportunities to direct and accept responsibility for their own composition. Peer feedback, using the strategies of collaborative learning, will play a more important role in improving students’ writing abilities.

2.2.3 Critical Thinking

Critical thinking is referred to the intellectually disciplined process of conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication. The core critical thinking skills include observation, interpretation, analysis, inference, evaluation, explanation, and metacognition.

The activity of exchanging ideas with peers not only increase enthusiasm among the participants but also encourages critical thinking. The skill of being able to critically evaluate peers compositions, to look at a classmate’s papers and provide effective feedback, is a very essential skill for students. Developing critical thinking may also help students effectively review others’ texts and see logic problems or defects, in order to make students become better writers and self-reviewers.

2.3 Studies of Peer Feedback in Writing

2.3.1 Overseas Studies of Peer Feedback

Peer feedback has been shown to be positive in many foreign studies. Nelson and Murphy (1992: 71-94) pointed out that students were actively engaging in and understanding the evolving peer feedback. And students developed objectivity in relation to standards which can then be transferred through their peculiar work by commenting on the work of peers. Kwangsu and MacArthur (2010: 328-338) believed that giving feedback to peers prompts a more critical reflection on preparedness and presentation of one paper. Beaven summarized studies on peer response done in the early ages and concluded that “the improvement in theme-writing ability and grammar usage may equal exceed the improvement that occurs under evaluation procedures carried out by the teacher.” (Beaven, 1997: 35)

However, there are also numerous studies on the negative effect of peer feedback. Nelson and Murphy argued that “peer review has limited value in the L2 classroom” (Nelson and Murphy, 1992: 90). Research has shown that teachers are concerned about the quality of peer review because of students’ limited knowledge, experience and language ability. Therefore, Mendonca and Johnson (1994: 745-769) held the practice of peer feedback may discourage the usage of target language among students. They made a similar conclusion that peer feedback among students with high language proficiency promotes the students’ communicative competence, but poor language proficiency may affect students’ communicative competence in a negative way.

Because of the limitations owing to students’ inadequacy of language proficiencies, some experts argue that peer feedback is of questionable value in L2 classroom.

2.3.2Domestic Studies of Peer Feedback

With the increasing popularity of peer feedback research in foreign countries, many researches have been done to investigate the effectiveness of peer feedback in China. Many of them concerning peer feedback are positive. “Peer feedback might give a sense of freshness to students, enabling them to cultivate the ability to revise their individual essays.” (Chen Hai, 1994: 45) Another empirical study, based on an eight-week experiment on peer feedback in an EFL writing class, showed that “peer feedback has operational significance in the English writing instruction and was an effective way to improve students’ writing ability” (Meng Xiao, 2009: 62).

On the other hand, some studies support the idea that peer feedback is of questionable value in Chinese EFL writing instruction. Some researchers express worries about the reliability of peer feedback. They argue that, students are not so professional and competent to provide effective peer feedback. “Peer feedback can’t be carried out due to students’ low language proficiency.” (Zhang Ying, 2000:26)

Peer feedback is a premature research field in China, which needs further efforts and explorations by teachers and experts.

3. The Feasibility and Effectiveness of Peer Feedback

3.1 The Feasibility of Peer Feedback

3.1.1 Positive Reactions of Peer Feedback

As we all know, learners get accustomed to receive teacher feedback in English writing instruction in China. Therefore, there has been a discussion about whether students welcome peer feedback.

Mo (2005: 43-48) carried out a study of 20 English majors at Zhejiang University. He found that most Chinese students held positive attitudes towards peer feedback. 87% of the participants showed that they were willing or very willing to review their partners’ composition. 96% of them considered peer feedback as useful or very useful. 91% indicated that they would incorporate peer comments into their revisions. 70% agreed that peer review was an effective way of improving their writing skills.

Meng’s (2009: 59-62) study of 40 non-English majors at Shandong University also found students’ approval of peer feedback. Most students had positive attitude towards peer feedback. 72.5% of the students declared clearly that peer feedback was of great help to their English writing. 62.5% of them pointed out that their writing motivation was greatly stimulated by taking part in peer feedback. 77.5% of them indicated that they were willing or very willing to provide peer feedback. 77.5% of them would revise their essay with peer’s suggestions. 62.5% of the students confirmed that peer feedback was very helpful in improving their writing ability.

Zhao’s (2010: 3-17) study distinguished learners’ use from their understanding of peer feedback and their understanding of teacher feedback in the revising stage of learners’ writing. 18 Chinese university English learners took part in the study. Zhao found that the learners incorporated more teacher feedback than peer feedback. However, the participants revealed that they used a larger percentage of teacher feedback without full understanding in the interview. Among the peer feedback that was incorporated in learners’ revisions, 83% of peer feedback was fully understood by the learners. By contrast, only 58% of teacher feedback was found to be used with a true understanding.

Based on the above studies, we can conclude that Chinese students are in approval of getting feedback from their peers, even if they may think teacher feedback is of great value.

3.1.2 Capability of Providing Effective Peer Feedback

One of the reasons of students’ affective preference for teacher feedback lies in that they don’t believe students can provide high quality feedback, especially in L2 English writing instructions. However, by analyzing learners’ revisions, it suggests that Chinese students are already able to detect and correct errors in their peers’ writings.

Peer feedback appeared to bring about a higher percentage of meaning-change revision while most teacher-influenced revisions were at surface level. The effective negotiation of meaning and mutual understanding in the peer interaction probably explains it. And learners could offer more effective peer feedback in content, language and organization (Yang, Badger and Yu, 2006: 179-200).

Meng’s (2009: 59-62) findings were also consistent with the above. The researcher used T-test Significance Analysis and Spearman Correlation to analyze the consistency in teacher and peer scoring. She found that teachers and students gave similar scores on the same composition in tests. This demonstrates that students are capable of assessing others’ essays, and this reliability might be improved after training.

By distinguishing between the incorrect and the correct revisions, Mo (2005: 43-48) examined the effectiveness of peer revision. They also calculated the proportions of the two major types of revisions. Findings indicated that 23 students made 186 revisions after they received peer feedback, with each student making an average number of 8.09 revisions. Among the 186 revisions, 135 are peer revisions which account for 72.58% of the total. More significantly, 88.89% of peer revisions are correct. Therefore, it’s safe to say that students are capable of providing effective peer revisions.

3.2. The Effectiveness of Peer Feedback

Peer feedback has been demonstrated to be effective in L2 researches. This part mainly discusses the benefits of peer feedback to the students who give peer feedback.

3.2.1 Improving English Writing Proficiency

Some researches show that L2 writing students can improve their own writing proficiency by transferring abilities that they learn when they review peer"s writings. Moreover, these researches also indicate that students taught to give peer feedback improve in their own writing abilities more than students taught to use peer feedback. Peer feedback gives learners diversity with teaching compared with the traditional way of providing teacher feedback. “In peer feedback session, students can cooperate with their peers to do more practices in writing.” (Kurt, 2007: 20) In this case, students’ anxiety becomes lower, and students’ learning motivation can be higher. Therefore, they have more opportunities to write better and improve their writing in the aspects of organization, content and language.

Kristi and Baker (2009: 30-43) analyzed the gains in writing ability between L2 students who give peer feedback and students who receive peer feedback. Results showed that the givers focusing solely on reviewing peers’ writing, made more significant gains in their own writing over the course of experiment than did the receivers focusing only on how to use peer feedback, especially in the meaning level. Such findings are inspiring since they suggest that peer review may be even more beneficial than thought before. It is not just the added feedback students receive on their writing, nor the language interaction practice helping improve student writing, the act of giving feedback may also improve student writing and may be the most beneficial aspect of peer review. An explanation may be that learners are still learning how to negotiate with their peer reviewer to receive feedback within their (the reviser’s) ZPD. Therefore, learners who are peer feedback givers benefit more than learners only receiving peer feedback. Peer review may be a process that requires writers to understand how to negotiate with their peers for instruction that falls within their ZPD.

Graner’s (1987: 45) study showed that L2 learners who review their peers composition but not receive any feedback with their own work, improved at the same rate as learners who join in traditional peer review activities. The findings once again suggested that, for writing learners, giving feedback is at least, if not more, beneficial than receiving it. When students are involved in the evaluation process, they will try their best to think of the entire writing, hoping to give some useful comments to their peers.

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