Abstract
Building upon Zimmerman’s socio-cognitive view of self-regulation, we explored EFL (English as a Foreign Language) students’ revision and the likely contribution to revision from three salient self-regulating sources: peer feedback, instructor feedback, and revision goals. Data was obtained from 70 Chinese EFL students in a writing class through a 300-word online writing assignment involving online instructor and peer feedback, free-response revision goals, and a required revision. We closely coded students’ revision and then used the same coding scheme to analyze the relative levels of association of revision changes with peer comments, instructor comments and revision goals. We found that: (a) the majority of revision changes have been triggered by three mediating sources, with revision goals as the most significant contributing source. Additionally, most revision changes come from a combination of two or three sources, with the overlap of peer feedback and revision goals accounting for the biggest overlapping contribution for both high and low-level revisions; (b) as for the relationship among the three sources, no significant difference was found between revision goals’ overlap rate with peer feedback and their overlap rate with instructor feedback. Instructor feedback and peer feedback did not overlap very much. Findings suggest that students could revise beyond instructor and peer feedback in their revision efforts guided by their own reflective goals, and peer feedback could function as a more productive and multiple-reader source of revision in comparison with instructor feedback. This study also provided evidence for students’ self-regulated learning of writing through the use of self-regulating resources and charted a route for how writing could be improved.
Highlights
A number of studies have found that students could achieve more when involved in selfregulated learning of writing processes like goal setting and feedback (Zimmerman, 2000; Teng and Zhang, 2016; Panadero, 2017; Zhang, 2018)
To explore the cumulative effects of instructor feedback, peer feedback, and revision goals, the study generated a coding framework applied across revision changes and all three sources
It is especially worth noting that both high and low-level revisions were most likely to be associated with the combination of peer feedback and revision goals, occupying the largest category of association in the Venn diagram shown in Figure 5, especially for low-level revisions with 40% of revisions coming from peer feedback plus revision goals
Summary
A number of studies have found that students could achieve more when involved in selfregulated learning of writing processes like goal setting and feedback (Zimmerman, 2000; Teng and Zhang, 2016; Panadero, 2017; Zhang, 2018). Instructor feedback, as a powerful and useful resource in the revision process, has led to writing improvement over drafts (Hyland, 2003; Hyland and Hyland, 2006a; Ferris, 2010). Peer feedback, as another important resource, can invoke reflection for self-assessment and improve EFL writing performance (Min, 2006; Topping, 2009; Boud and Molloy, 2013; Lee, 2017; Zhang, 2018; Li and Zhang, 2019). Most of the previous studies centered on strategies’ effects independent of each other or one strategy’s effect over another, and the combined effects of the salient self-regulated strategies on writing and revision are seldom explored, even though they quite often appear together in EFL writing context and work together toward self-regulated learning (Liu and Carless, 2006; Min, 2006; Yang et al, 2006; Min, 2016; Hu and Gao, 2018)
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