Peer Feedback and Its Effects on Chinese English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) Learners’ Text Revisions and Writing Performance

Abstract

Peer feedback, an activity in which learners read others’ drafts and make comments on them orally and/or in written mode, is widely employed in writing instruction. Extensive studies investigating its effects have been conducted. However, several issues remain under-researched, including long-term effects of peer feedback on writing performance, learners’ processing of peer feedback in revision, and learners’ perceptions of peer feedback. This thesis reports on a study that addresses these research gaps. This study was conducted during a semester-long College English course at a Chinese university. It was comprised of three parts. Part One investigated the effects of a rigorous peer feedback intervention on text revisions and writing performance. The treatment group participants engaged in six writing tasks with peer feedback activities while the comparison group participants wrote on the same topics and received the conventional collective feedback from their teacher to the whole class. Their two drafts of one writing task were compared to examine effects of the intervention on text revisions and their compositions in the pre-, post-, and delayed post-tests were compared to investigate its effects on writing performance. Part Two was a case study in which think-aloud protocols were analyzed to explore how students processed peer feedback when writing their second drafts. As a final part, Part Three employed questionnaire and interviews to explore students’ perceptions of the intervention, specifically any perceived changes in their writing performance and their perceived helpfulness of specific components within the intervention. Results reveal that the intervention had positive effects on students’ text revisions. The treatment group participants made significant improvements between drafts in the overall text quality, content, organization, accuracy, and syntactic complexity, although not in lexical complexity or fluency. In addition, their second drafts were better in the overall text quality, content and organization than those written by the comparison group participants. The analysis of the think-aloud protocols showed that students utilized various cognitive operations and consequently two different approaches to process peer feedback when writing their second drafts. The intervention was also found to have positive effects on students’ writing performance. The treatment group participants made significant improvements in the overall text quality, content, organization, accuracy in the post-test and they retained the improvements twelve weeks after the intervention. The treatment group participants outperformed their counterparts receiving collective feedback in the overall text quality and organization in the post- and delayed post-tests, and in accuracy only in the delayed post-test. The data from the questionnaire and interviews corroborated positive effects of the intervention on writing performance and suggested that there were other areas that the intervention might have positive effects on. These findings were discussed as to how specific components in the intervention as well as students’ efforts in processing peer feedback contributed to improvements in text revisions and writing performance. This study extends the existing literature on peer feedback in several ways. Theoretically, it has examined long-term effects of peer feedback on writing performance, adding strong evidence to the long-standing debate about the effects of peer feedback. The findings about cognitive operations and approaches in processing feedback suggest adaptations to Hayes’ (1996) revision model. Pedagogically, this study provides L2 writing practitioners with practical insights into writing instruction in relation to teachers’ incorporating peer feedback and helping students improve writing proficiency.