Writing has always been regarded as one of the most important skills in bothEnglish teaching and learning as a foreign language (EFL). Actually, writing is acomplex interwoven process including planning, writing, and revising. Students find itdifficult to write in English, complaining about creating ideas, failing to organize theirwriting clearly or sometimes failing to compose grammatically correct English sentencesin practice. Perplexed by these problems, most EFL writing teachers make a great deal ofefforts improve the students' writing competence; however, their students achieveunsatisfactory progress in their English writing. The efforts that the EFL writing teachersmake mainly include (1) before class, searching the reference books and the Internet forappropriate samples and writing tasks; (2) in class, organizing their class teaching bydifferent methods; and (3) after class, providing feedback to their students' compositions.Among them, the third type of efforts-—providing feedback, i.e. providing students withinformation about their performance, plays a crucial role in English writing teaching andlearning. In English language teaching, feedback usually refers to the returninginformation for a certain study task to improve and promote students' learning. Feedbackis very important in helping the writer to assess effectively the written words and mediatethe intended message (Amdt, 1993). For many years, writing teachers have used writtenfeedback as a pedagogical tool to enhance the teaching of students' writing performance.That is, providing feedback to students serves as a crucial role for EFL writing teachersto enable their students to become aware of the recursive nature of the composingprocess (Paulus, 1999).Offering feedback to students is one of writing teachers' most important tasks inwriting education, which helps students understand what the students have acquired intheir work and provides encouragement for their performance. It is the nature of teachingto make judgments, to decide whether one composition is better than another or whethera learner is developing satisfactorily (Gannon, 1985). EFL student writers generallyexpect to be given feedback on their written texts. However, the fact that the class inChina is always too big makes correcting writing time-consuming, English teachers arenot sure to provide all students complex feedback in time, though offering feedback toStudents is one of their important tasks. If students can give comments and feedback (theso-called peer feedback in the present paper) for each other on English writing, it will bea big help for EFL writing teachers. Therefore, it is important and necessary to examinethe effects of teacher feedback and peer feedback on EFL writing, especially how peerfeedback is used as the complement of teacher feedback to enhance the efficiency of EFLwriting teaching.The previous researches have examined the effects of peer feedback on EFL writing.Some have investigated the effects of peer feedback and study how it supplementsteachers' feedback in college writing courses. However, in their researches three issuesare worth further studying-— (1) the focuses, (2) criteria and (3) form of feedback. (l)Tomake it specific, most have focused on the superficial or local issues, such as, thestudents' grammatical competence while few are on global issues, that is, the content andorganization. At the facet of content and orga，英语毕业论文，英语毕业论文 |
