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1 Introduction

Davies and Pearse (2004) claim that "good writing skills usually develop from extensivereading, some specific training，and a good deal of practice". English teachers (Zheng Yuqi,1992) have long been aware of this point. But they still have a lot of problems in teachingpractice such as how to correct errors in students' writing. As research in language teachingdevelops, researchers and language teachers have a new understanding of students* errors. Onthe one hand，students' errors help teachers know about the present state of students* learning;teachers can therefore analyze causes of errors and find a better way of teaching; on the otherhand, students' errors also help researchers to study and find the process of language learning.As a matter of fact, feedback on students* writing is always a necessary part of writingprocess; and more and more researchers and teachers have focused on feedback in second andforeign language teaching. Generally, there are three ways of feedback on writing: teacherfeedback, self-feedback and peer feedback. The traditional teacher-student relationship,learning habit and teaching methods make students rely more on teachers rather than theirpeers or themselves in learning (Wang, 2006). So teacher feedback becomes the mostauthoritative and popular way of feedback on writing (Ellis, 2007; Tan & Guo, 2010; Zhao,2010). Other ways of feedback, like peer feedback, is seldom fully appreciated by students.Each student finishes a piece of writing，the teacher then collects them all, and usually spendsseveral hours reading and comments on students' writings after class. However，the teacher'sfeedback is often vague and general with global assessments such as "A", "B" or "good" andso on because of the large number of pieces of writing. Sometimes the teacher just scores thewriting without any elaborate explanations on students* writings. In many cases, teacherfeedback is the same as grading. Students also regard grades as the only measure of a piece ofwriting. When they get their compositions back, the first thing for them is to check the grades.They only care about the grades, hardly ever reread their compositions.
They claim that peer feedback can enhance the students' sense of the audience, makestudents aware of the strengths and weaknesses in their writings, foster students, ownership oftheir writings, and encourage cooperative learning and interaction among students.Based on previous research and the present situations of writing instructions, the presentstudy is to probe the attitudes of students at different language proficiencies towards peerfeedback and their actions in response to it，and to examine the effects of peer feedback on thewriting of feedback receivers. The aims of the study are to improve students' awareness of theimportance of peer feedback and to shed insights into corrective feedback and writinginstructions. The present thesis is structured in six parts. Part 1 is an introduction, which includes theresearch background and the purpose of the thesis. Part 2 is the literature review. It firstintroduces the theoretical framework of peer feedback: Vygotsky's social-cultural theory, theZone of Proximal Development, and Collaborative Learning. Then it focuses on the definitionand classification of feedback，studies on corrective feedback and peer feedback. Part 3 ismethodology，which includes research questions，parti本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。