Development of a Checklist for Peer Review Activities in a Beginning College English Composition Class

Abstract

Peer review has been considered one of the promising instructional methods to help students understand the social nature of writing and the importance of revision. However, given our students’ linguistic inability and inexperience in English writing, some supportive measures need to be taken to take advantage of this invaluable learning experience to their writing ability development maximally. This study assumes that presenting them a checklist with important points to be discussed with peers is critical for the successful implementation of the activity in the classroom. When it is being developed, the instructor must reflect on the unique characteristics of her class and integrate them into the development. To demonstrate how it can be built, writing samples of students in a beginning English writing class in a four-year university and their peer review practices were studied. As the first step of the development, the students’ writing proficiency was assessed at the beginning and end of the course to establish the course objective that was defined as a proficiency level in the IELTS Writing Band Descriptors. Then, the descriptors was analyzed to identify writings features to be included in the checklist. Finally, their competence manifested in their papers and comments was studied to select suitable writing features for their proficiency and the course objective.