EFL Students' Reactions to Peer versus Teacher Feedback to Improve Writing Skills: A Study at Intermediate School Level

Abstract

Feedback is crucial for assisting EFL writers since writing in English is challenging for them. Although numerous research studies have been done on the usefulness of peer and teacher feedback in EFL writing, studies that show the differences between the effectiveness of teacher's feedback versus peer's feedback and the student's reactions to mixing feedback are generally rare. This study was thus conducted on the peer and teacher feedback and both feedback model in three writing paragraphs for twenty students at an intermediate school in Buraydah, Saudi Arabia, where English is taught as a foreign language. To identify the students' reactions in the pre-post application of the questionnaire and the pre-post test design for one group of students, the study used a semi-experimental approach. The findings indicated no significant differences at a significance level of less than 0.05 between the mean scores of the peers and the teacher feedback. The experiment had success in terms of students’ positive attitudes towards mixing feedback models, the usefulness of peer comments, high percentages of feedback incorporations, and high overall writing scores. Therefore, based on the study results, the researcher confirms the usefulness of mixed feedback and recommends using it to improve student's' English writing skills.