Abstract
Despite the increasing popularity of peer feedback in EFL writing classrooms, little research has been conducted to explore how individual factors such as learner beliefs may influence L2 students’ use of peer feedback. From an ecological perspective (van Lier, 2000, 2004), this exploratory case study investigated the extent of peer feedback use by two purposefully-chosen Chinese EFL university students and how their use of feedback was mediated by learner beliefs, a salient factor that emerged from the study. Detailed qualitative data were collected from multiple sources: written documents, stimulated recall, semi-structured interviews, and classroom observations. The findings indicated that the two students integrated peer comments selectively into their revision across two tasks. The selective use of peer feedback was found to be mediated by writing beliefs related to qualities of good English expository writing, to the importance of word limit and to student reviewer roles. Seen from an ecological perspective (van Lier, 2000, 2004), these writing beliefs were employed by the students to create affordances to mediate the use of feedback while some of these beliefs were shaped by local classroom affordances (Peng, 2011). Pedagogical implications of the findings are also discussed.
Highlights
During the past several decades, L2 writing classrooms have witnessed the growing popularity of peer feedback as a component of process-oriented writing instruction (Lockhart & Ng, 1995; Tsui & Ng, 2000; Zhao, 2010)
From an ecological perspective, this exploratory case study investigated the extent of peer feedback use by two purposefully-chosen Chinese EFL university students and how their use of feedback was mediated by learner beliefs, a salient factor that emerged from the study
Using an ecological perspective, this paper reports on an exploratory case study that investigates the extent of peer feedback use by two purposefully-chosen students in a university EFL writing course in China, one of the under-represented EFL contexts in feedback research (Lee, 2014), and how their selection of peer feedback was mediated by their beliefs about EFL writing, a salient factor among others that emerged from the study
Summary
During the past several decades, L2 writing classrooms have witnessed the growing popularity of peer feedback as a component of process-oriented writing instruction (Lockhart & Ng, 1995; Tsui & Ng, 2000; Zhao, 2010). To ascertain the effect of peer feedback on student revision, researchers have investigated different dimensions of peer-mediated revision (e.g. writing quality after revision, types of revision, focus of revision, etc.). Among these dimensions, the extent of peer feedback use has been identified as an important aspect to explore, in studies that compare student use of teacher and peer feedback (Paulus, 1999; Tsui & Ng, 2000; Yang, Badger, & Yu, 2006; Zhao, 2010). By focusing on the factor of learner beliefs, an individual factor often ignored in feedback research (Storch & Wigglesworth, 2010), this paper contributes to our understanding about the influence of students’ writing beliefs on their use of peer feedback, and provides insights into helping students make informed decisions in selecting peer feedback to improve writing
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