Peer feedback and its impact in the writing process of International Baccalaureate students in a public institution

Abstract

This research study aimed at enhancing English language learners’ writing skills to promote communication among them. The process involved five weeks of applying and practicing the stages of the writing process. Twenty-nine high school public EFL students participated in the investigation. They had an A2 – B1 level of proficiency and faced challenges at writing complete and consistent paragraphs. Peer feedback facilitated by Google Docs provided students with opportunities for practicing, interaction, communication, and reflection. The instruments were a pretest-posttest to measure students’ writing improvement. Pre-post surveys were applied to collect the perspectives of students towards peer feedback. Field notes were completed during the group tasks to analyze students’ difficulties in writing activities. Findings report higher scores in the posttest, and a Cohen’s d = 2.98. This suggests that the application of peer feedback in the writing process helped learners improve the quality of their written compositions. Students’ perspectives indicate that this intervention raised their self-confidence, peer communication, and motivation. The difficulties that were observed at the beginning were overcome at the end of the intervention.