Peer review: Is Giving Corrective Feedback Better than Receiving it in L2 Writing?

Abstract

Abstract The effect of peer review on L2 writing has already been established. The benefit of peer review to the feedback giver, however, remains to be explored. This quasi-experimental study intends to examine the effect of giving peer corrective feedback on the writing of givers against the effect of receiving it from peers. The study was conducted in an EFL classroom setting with 45 learners of English in three writing classes who were labelled as the “givers”, the “receivers”, and the comparison group. Over four sessions of treatment, the givers reviewed the writing of the receivers with two functions of English articles (a/an as the first mention and the as the anaphoric reference) and simple past tense (regular and irregular) as the features in focus without receiving any comments from others on their writing. The receivers received feedback from peers but were deprived of giving any feedback to others. The comparison group, however, neither gave nor received any peer feedback. The study followed a pretest, posttest, delayed posttest design. Analyses run on the data obtained from a picture description task and a grammaticality judgment test indicated that the givers made significantly more improvements than the receivers and the receivers, in turn, made significantly more improvements than the comparison group in terms of the forms targeted.