Abstract
The present study attempted to uncover EFL learners’ perceptions of and attitudes towards peer feedback in writing classes under conventional and computer-mediated conditions. In so doing, the participants who were university upper-intermediate literature sophomores studying in two intact classes were assigned randomly to two control (conventional) and experimental (online) peer feedback treatments. The participants of the two groups took two questionnaires at the beginning and at the end of the treatment. Some of the participants took part in follow-up interviews to disclose their perceptions, attitudes, and experiences of conventional and online peer feedback activity. The results indicated that the participants of both groups were content with their experience of peer feedback activity. They found peer feedback an acceptable activity which provided them with a non-threatening condition to exchange ideas. However, at the end of the treatment, the online group students had more positive perceptions of and attitudes towards peer feedback activity.
Highlights
Peer feedback, endorsed by different theoretical and pedagogical underpinnings, is gaining momentum in the realm of second language writing in the third millennium
The findings of this study revealed that EFL students at the tertiary level found both conventional and CMC peer feedback beneficial
The participants found peer review activity valuable and beneficial, but what is worth-noticing is the higher level of the CMC group; it seems that the experience of the CMC group students of peer feedback activity was more pleasant
Summary
Peer feedback, endorsed by different theoretical and pedagogical underpinnings, is gaining momentum in the realm of second language writing in the third millennium. In addition to ZPD, collaborative learning theory, bolding the significance of learners’ pooling of resources of different kinds (Bruffer, 1984), interaction hypothesis, stressing the benefits of the negotiation of meaning that occurs in the stress-free social interactions between language learners (Jacobs & McCafferty, 2006), and output hypothesis, which finds learners’ production as a vehicle to increase learners’ access to better input, force syntactic processing, and develop learners’ automaticity, discourse skills and personal voice (Swain, 1985), are mentioned as the theoretical backings of peer feedback (Liu & Hansen, 2002). Peer feedback exchanges were once limited to the conventional media such as oral face-to-face, and conventional written media, computer-mediated communication (CMC), developed in the form of website, weblog, wiki, forum, social network and instant message systems, emerged to be an alternative (Tuzi, 2004; Wu, 2006)
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