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Chapter One Introduction

In this part, background of this study is introduced firstly. Next, the researchpurposes of the study are presented in detail, followed by the significance of thestudy. Lastly, it is the layout of the thesis.

1.1 Background of the Study
In China, there are various kinds of English tests that students need to pass,meanwhile, writing section can be found in almost all tests. There is no doubt thatEnglish writing plays an important role in the assessment of student's English outputcompetence. For college students, they are required to write compositions of a rangeof genres in appropriate and concise language, but most learners often complain thatit is too stressful for them to meet these requirements. In that situation, educators alsoface lots of teaching difficulties of how to change students’ attitudes towards writinglearning.As early as 30 years ago, American researchers had made suggestions forchanging the view of considering students’ English writing as one-off products,conversely, students’ writing activity should be seen as “ process of discoveringmeaning”. With the rise of process approach, focus of research has been on the everyparts of the process pre-writing, composing/drafting, revising and editing. In China,teaching of English writing also experienced such changes, hence it is required thatteachers should not only focus on the final result of the composition, but also guidestudents to enjoy the whole writing process and then make their writing ability to beimproved.
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1.2 Research Purposes
As what have been introduced in the above part, many researches have exploredthe peer revision from varied perspectives, but few have focused on the genderdifference of scaffolding functions in this activity. Many scholars have proved thetight relationship between the gender factor and language. There is no doubt that,influenced by the gender perceptions, boys and girls have their differentconversational styles to communicate with each other. Especially in thecommunication process of peer revision activity, scaffolding functions are built onthe oral language, therefore, to some extent, gender factor must first influence theirconversational styles and then affect the scaffolding functions in the revision activity.Researcher puts forward this hypothesis in the present study, and hope that thefinal experimental results could be useful to refine the design of peer revisionactivity.To be specific, this study focuses on the gender difference of communicationprocess in peer revision activity. Through arranging different gender pairs, researchercan observe their changes of scaffolding functions, and gender pairs should includethree types: the boy-boy pair, girl-girl pair, and boy-girl pair. In particular, researcherattempts to record different gender pairs’ dialogues, and these recordings should betranscribed to the written mode. Peers’ revision communication process will bedetailedly studied in the research, in order to find out students different adoptions ofscaffolding when then are faced with different gender partners. Through interviewing,researcher needs to find whether their gender perceptions and conversational stylesare the possible reasons causing these differences.
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Chapter Two Literature Review

This part gives a general review of related basic concepts, which are thescientific foundations of this