Chapter One Introduction
1.1 Research Background
As an international language, English benefits people a lot, such as enablingpeople to grasp the latest news anywhere, communicate with foreigners or getpromoted in study or career, etc. So Chinese students are required to have acomprehensive ability of English learning which includes the ability to listen, speak,read and write. The New English Curriculum Standards have also put forward thenecessity for students to have a solid foundation of English so as to communicate oruse it in daily life. And among the four basic language skills mentioned above, writingability is always the most difficult one for students to master. Just as Nunan (2001:271)says in his work “Among the four basic skills of English learning, writing is the last insequence but should by no means be the least in importance. In terms of skills,producing a coherent, fluent, extended piece of writing is probably the most difficultthing there is to do in language. It is something most native speakers never master.”This situation can also be proved from the score distribution in CET 4 and CET 6which are the English tests for non-English major college students. Compared withother skills like reading and listening, the average scores of writing are the weakest,some are even lower than the required points (Li 2000). A more depressingphenomenon is that after practicing, the scores of reading and listening parts can beincreased, but the average scores of English writing remain the same level. So theunsatisfactory situation of college non-English major students’ English writing is notcomforting and there is a lot to be improved in order to meet the qualifications ofCollege English Curriculum Requirements which is issued in 2007 by Ministry ofEducation.
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1.2 Research Significance and Objectives
With the global economy’s increasing need of graduates who have a solidknowledge of English, the writing abilities are not satisfied by the majority ofcompanies. Also based on the 2007 College English Curriculum Requirements,graduates should grasp the ability to communicate with others by writing in Englishlanguage. However, writing is the most annoying part for them (Liu 1998). Teacherfeedback is used most frequently in traditional writing. So if it is applied appropriately,students will make great progress in writing. Also plenty of researches have provedthat students can benefit from teacher feedback, but there are some problems existing.For example, sometimes teacher feedback is ambiguous, general, ineffective and noteasy to understand. And teachers feel pressured to comment on the whole class’swritings. So it is worthwhile to investigate how to help English teachers deal with theheavy burden. In addition, the great benefits of peer feedback have been noticed by alot of researchers. Keh (1990) once mentions that peer feedback could rescue teachersfrom the heavy burden of work and it is helpful for students to achieve a sense ofaudience by cooperating with classmates. Besides, students would learn to readothers’ work critically by being involved in the process. Moreover, according toZamel (1985) and Berg (1999), students are capable of offering useful feedbacks atdifferent English proficiency levels; pre-training can result in better revisions andimprovements; it’s better to complement teacher and peer feedback. So using peerfeedback may be a good way to free teacher from the thankless and laborious job andget students more interested in the writing processes. However, because students arenot clear about its purpose and afraid that peer feedback from classmates whoseEnglish proficiency level are not as good as theirs is not a perfect alternative to theteacher’s notations, it is not used widely in English writing classes. And teacherscontinue wondering whether peer feedback differs from teacher feedback, and if thetwo feedbacks do have differences, what they are. As a result, although there are manyresearches putting forward preci
