As for the effects of peer feedback in students’ revisions, Paulus (1999) suggested that teacher feedback exerted more effects on students’ revisions than peer feedback. He found that the 12 undergraduate international students in his pre-freshmen composition class were far more likely to incorporate teacher feedback (87%) than peer feedback (51%) in their revisions. As with Paulus’ participants, the 12 Chinese college EFL learners in Yang et al’s 2006 study used a larger amount of teacher feedback (90%) than peer feedback (76%) in their revisions. We may see, accordingly, that teacher feedback exerted more effects on learners’ revisions than peer feedback by college ESL/EFL learners. This, on one hand, explains learners’ preference for teacher feedback and, on the other hand, suggests the possible impact of learners’ affective disadvantage over peer feedback on their use of it.

(3) the obstacles of implementing peer feedback

In view of learners’ affective disadvantage to peer feedback, lack of training in revising peer’s work appeared to be most frequently mentioned. For example, Rollinson (2005) justified training as engineering the efficiency of peer feedback in terms of the focus, the appropriateness and the collaboration dynamics, saying this:

Without such training, it is more likely that student response will be inappropriate: it may be destructive and tactless (or, conversely, overgenerous and uncritical); it may also tend towards dealing with surface matters rather than issues of meaning and content, or it may be prescriptive and authoritarian rather than collaborative and supportive. (Rollinson 2005, pg.26)

Therefore, continued exploration of the use of peer feedback in writing is highly warranted and relevant. Given the aforementioned benefits of peer feedback, and the relative paucity of research regarding the use of peer feedback at the undergraduate level, the aims of my study are: (1) to verify the effectiveness of peer feedback in the writing classroom; (2) to figure out more problems during peer feedback, come up some practical solutions and propose some suggestions for future research; (3) to give some suggestions about how to deal with the relationship between teacher feedback and peer feedback to maximize students’ writing ability.

3. Research design

This research aimed to explore students’ use of feedback in a real classroom and how it influences their writings, and specifically, 1) to identify students’ beliefs, expectations and attitudes in regard to the value of feedback on their writing and 2) to figure out some problems students may encounter during the application of peer feedback and 3) to propose some practical suggestions for improvement of peer feedback in the real classroom.

This part introduces the research design including the context in which the research was conducted, the background information of the participants, and the way in which the data was collected and analyzed.

The research used an actual situation in a local context: a 6-week summer session writing course in UCLA. The participants were Chinese students in the second or third year from different colleges in different majors.

This course is designed to improve the reading speed and comprehension of international students, while also expanding upon their knowledge of academic writing conventions and practices. The course dedicates much time to common issues that are essential for college-level success, such as synthesizing information from sources, providing proper citations, and avoiding plagiarism.

This research process integrated the author’s experience into the learning experiences of the student as a multi-method approach or triangulation: looking for different kinds of data and seeking the concurrence of pieces of evidence. The study used multi-methods in order to ensure adequate triangulation of data: 1) classroom observation 2) documentation: course documents: class syllables; reading materials; feedback sheets for the draft; assignments rubric sheets for the final version; record sheet for class debate; off-class discussion forum in CCLE website; teacher written feedback in CCLE website; and in-class self-evaluation journals. 3) questionnaires for students 4) interview questions with students 5) evaluative journal