After being a senior high English teacher for two years, I realized that having

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.1 Motivation

After being a senior high English teacher for two years, I realized that having

students hand in writing assignments is a painstaking process for both teachers and

students. In Taiwan, normally a senior high teacher needs to conduct the teaching of

two to three classes, each containing forty to fifty students. If the students are required

to hand in four assignments each semester, the total number of work that the teacher

needs to correct will amount to approximately 400-600 pieces of writing. If carefully

corrected, each piece of writing will take around half an hour. That means every

teacher needs to spend 200-300 extra hours correcting errors in his or her tight

schedule of teaching, let alone the teacher will review the first, second and the final

drafts of each assignment. And I believe that’s bitter enough to drain the enthusiasm

of any dedicated teacher. The demand for time to read and edit students’ assignments

always restricts me from assigning too many writing tasks to students. As for students,

the practice of a teacher-centered, product-oriented approach to the instruction of

writing makes them highly anxious about English writing. Many students are pushed

to compose their essays with only their first drafts, with little guidance in how to work

through the effective writing processes that quality writing requires. They are required

to produce writing without grammatical errors and the fear of negative evaluation

Such being the case, it’s worthwhile to consider adopting the process-oriented approach, which is with increasing popularity in these years. It focuses on the process of writing, with a paradigm that stresses audience and purpose, and views writing as a process composed of prewriting, composing, and revision stages, which overlap and interconnect with one another during the production of writing (Hairston, 1982). With this approach, for one thing, a teacher is not a copy editor any more, but a guide to help them to plan, compose, and edit their own writing. For another, students are not evaluated only by his final product but also by the ongoing, multi-stage process. With equal emphasis given on each of the stages, I believe students’ writing apprehension on his performance will be lowered. As a result of this emphasis on audience, feedback, and revision, many writing instructors have begun to adopt peer response approach in their writing classes.

Dipardo and Freeman (1988) have suggested use of peer evaluation in process-oriented writing instruction. On one hand, students may be able to identify the strength and weakness of their own writings more objectively if they obtain a different perspective from their peers. Furthermore, peers could provide criticism at the student writer’s level, benefit from learning to critically evaluate papers of others (Keh, 1990).

A number of studies on peer evaluation of L1 and L2 writings (Beach, 1989; Paulus,

1999; Stanley, 1992) have shown that by providing each other with feedback on their

preliminary drafts, students receive clearer and more specific feedback for revision,

have opportunities to learn from their peers’ suggestions and writings, acquire a wider

sense of audience, and obtain social support from their peers.

In the meantime, with the development of information technology, a lot of innovative web-assisted language instructions have evolved recently. For example, the program of Advanced Joint English Teaching (AJET) has been developed. Besides, the system of Intelligent web-based Interactive Language Learning (IWiLL) has also been incorporated into the English language teaching and learning. With the aid of web-based environment, students as well as teachers are able to monitor the leaning process without the limitation of time and distance. Frizler (1995) indicated that using computers could help students develop a sense of empowerment and communicative abilities. According to Chen (1996), on-line writing had a positive influence on students’ confidence in composition. As Sullivan (1998) suggested, web-based projects are well suited to peer-evaluation because the project and the peer review comments can be stored on publicly available web page, where can be easily found and read. Thus, the idea of integrating process-oriented approach, peer review and web-based learning into writing instruction is motivated.

1.2 Purpose of the Study

The study is to investigate the effects of peer assessment on writing instruction for senior high school students. The study will examine the influence on students’

writing apprehension after the treatment of peer assessment activity. Moreover,

students’ responses to the web-based peer assessment activity will be explored, too.

1.3 Research Questions

The study is designed to investigate the influence of implementing the web-based peer assessment approach on senior high school students. The two research questions addressed in this study are as follows:

1. Is students’ writing apprehension decreased after the web-based peer assessment activity?

2. What are the students’ responses to the web-based peer assessment activity?

1.4 Significance of the Study

The teaching and learning of English writing is always a source of frustration for both teachers and students. Due to the limitation of class hours and class sizes, students often only receive very few instructions and feedbacks from teachers, complaining about the vagueness of teachers’ annotations and claiming that they have no idea how to revise their writing further. Therefore, writing apprehension increases as a result of lack of involvement in their own writing process. All that they can do is squeeze up a piece of writing, hand in it, and wait until the final product is evaluated.

For teachers, a large volume of similar grammatical errors need to be corrected. They

just work as copy editors or grammatical correction makers, making these

time-consuming repetitions. The study tries to offer a possible solution to these

problems and contribute to the future writing instruction.

1.5 Definition of the Terms Used in the Thesis

In order to help readers understand the thesis much clearly, the definition of the terms is listed as follows:

Peer Assessment

Peer assessment can be briefly defined as “the development of knowledge and skill through explicit active helping and supporting among status equals or matched companions, with the deliberate intent to help others with their learning goals.”

(Topping and Ehly, 2001) It can also be referred as peer evaluation, peer marking, peer correction, peer feedback, peer rating, peer review, and peer appraisal.

Web-based Peer Assessment

Web-based peer assessment involves the use of computers connected to one another in either local or global networks. Typically, through E-mail or discussion board, students work in pairs or small groups, read each other’s writing pieces, ask questions and give suggestions or comments.

1.6 Limitations

First, only two classes of the same senior high school students, who study in

Taipei, will participate in the study. The number of subjects is quite small so that it’s

hard to generalize the results to all of the senior high students all over Taiwan. Besides,

the web-based peer review activity lasts only for less than one semester, which may

be too short to detect the long-term effect. The short-term effects may be partially

of time, a pilot study of the response questionnaire is not done. Therefore, the

questions that are not reliable and valid are not eliminated before the study is

conducted. Besides, Finally, the study could be more valid and reliable if it is

conducted by using experimental and controlled groups. One group takes part in the

peer assessment activity, getting plenty of feedback from peers while the other group

gets their writing only corrected by the teacher. However, it’s difficult to have

identical groups with totally the same learning conditions and teaching methods. To

prevent making the study too complex, the experimental and controlled groups are not

used.