Chapter 1 Introduction
1.1 General Research Background
In the process of foreign and second language learning, there are four basicskills: listening, speaking, reading and writing. The cultivation of writing ability hasa great influence upon the training of the other three skills (listening, reading andspeaking). Connor (1990) claimed that writing is of great importance instrengthening the ability to reinforce language skills.In fact, there are many causes regarding this—students tend to make poorperformance in English writing. Some reasons have been drawn out by someexperienced scholars (Connor, 1994; Amores, 1997; Zhang, 1995), among which theteaching method is considered to be one of the major external factors to influencestudents’ writing proficiency.Traditional teaching method, product approach, has been dominated in theteaching of English writing class in China for a long time. According to Pinca(1982),she pointed out that writing should focus on linguistic knowledge, such asvocabulary, syntax and cohesive devices. In this approach, teachers emphasize thefinal product, which is the final writing of the students while ignoring the students’writing process. The product-oriented method of teaching writing pays greatattention to the accuracy and samples, under which method students do not havemany opportunities to discuss with and receive guidance the teachers. PaulRollinson (2017) illustrates these views in details:There may have been deficiencies in the written comments of the teachers: theyhave been sometimes thought as being unspecific, incomprehensible, andinconsistent to the students. All of these thoughts come the truth that theteachers are overloaded and they could not spend much time on every single student.Their burdens to teach and correct students’ writing are great (Rollinson, 2017:25)This is particularly the case in China, where teachers are confronted with anumber of students in each class. Also the purpose of teaching writing is a reflectionof this, for example, classes are often focused on exam practice and, even inno-exam classes, and students produce only one draft and receive feedback on this.Concerning the drawback of the traditional teaching method, some scholarssuggested the use of process approach the teaching of English writing. With theincreasing of its popularity, the process approach in writing has been the mainstreampedagogy in EFL writing class. The process approach to writing attaches greatimportance to the process of writing, which, in particular, includes planning,transcribing and revision (Hayes, 1981). According to Sommers (1980), revision isnot only beneficial to the improvement of the writing quality but also promoteslearning by means of enabling writers to organize and reorganized ideas, and todiscover and create meanings.Peer feedback, as one form of process approach to English writing, has beenreceiving more and more attention worldwide. The use of peer feedback in thewriting process begins in L1 writing. And its usefulness as a technique for L1writing pedagogy is well documented in the literature (Barnes, 1976; Brief, 1984;Cazden, 1988.).However, the study of peer feedback in L2 writing did not spring upuntil 1980s. In addition, the results of relevant researches are not in consistent witheach other. For example, some empirical researches show that peer feedback play avital role which cannot be replaced by teacher feedback. In particul，英语论文题目，英语论文题目 |
