Peer Review

Writing 5

A Review on Peer Correction It can be seen that “peer review” has been applied in ESL teaching, especially in writing for a long time. However, only recently has it been researched profoundly. Among the studies on this issue, “Peer Review Negotiation: Revision Activities in ESL Writing Instruction” by Cássia O. Mendonça and Karen E. Johnson of the Pennsylvania State University (1994) can be considered a highlight. First, we would like to give a concise summary of this reading. In this study, the researchers surveyed 12 advanced non-native speakers of English who had the average TOEFL scores equal to or above 550 in a writing class for international graduate students at a big university. The subjects’ mother tongues were Chinese (5), Spanish (4), French (1), Indonesian (1) and Korean (1). Their majors were education, political science, environmental engineering, mechanical engineering, agriculture, and human development. The study was carried out through 3 phrases. - Phase 1 focused on how students negotiate during the peer reviews. - Phase 2 described how the peer reviews affect the process of revision activities. - Phase 3 dealt with post-interviews to determine whether the students like the peer reviews. Results show that during the peer reviews, students usually asked 2 main kinds of questions: explanation questions and comprehension-check questions. The students applied the ideas discussed in the peer reviews in three different ways: utilizing what they had discussed in their revisions, keeping a part of their written texts unchanged although they had discussed that part, changing a part that had not been included in the peer reviews. When mentioning “peer review”, we often think it is the activity of only two people – peer dyad. Actually, however, it can be applied for more than two – peer response group. According to Brief (1984), both peer dyads and peer response Lee Rain - Cantho University

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Writing 5 groups are equally important. Nonetheless, some researchers claim that peer review dyads support more writer-based analysis of their written texts whereas students are provided with a great deal of feedback by working in peer response groups. Meanwhile, others argue that students just act as tutors and tutees that are similar to the teacher-student hierarchical relationship. In our opinion, students will be more active when working in peer dyads rather than in peer response groups. In fact, students in peer dyads have more opportunities to give and receive advice, to ask and answer questions (DiPardo & Freedman 1988; Forman & Cazden, 1985; Goldstein & Conrad, 1990). One of the factors that determine the effectiveness of peer review is the extent to which teachers control this activity. Freedman’s study (1987) shows that when "peer reviews" are strictly controlled with peer edit sheets, students just focus on finishing the sheets than working with their peers. We personally think that teachers should consider how much control they can apply over peer reviews based on the students’ level. According to DiPardo and Freedman (1988), the nature of the peer interactions and the students’ revision may be affected by the configuration of the reviews under study and the amount of teachers’ control toward the peer reviews as well as students’ written texts. In the configuration of peer reviews, teachers should group the students according to their levels and fields of study. When students are at the same level and in the same field of study, they are likely to understand each other better than those are not. In this study, the researchers record the negotiations in the students’ peer reviews. They recognize that students from different fields of study use more explanation questions during the negotiations (18%) than those from the same field of study (12%). Therefore, a student has to spend a great deal of time on explaining specialized terms that are familiar to him/her, but so new to the other(s). Mendonça and Johnson find that the explanations fall into three categories: explanation of unclear points in the written text (6%), explanation of opinions (22%) and explanation of content (8%). Besides, it is not surprising to note that students from different fields of study also use comprehension check questions Lee Rain - Cantho University

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Writing 5 rather frequently (12%) also because of a lack of shared knowledge of fieldspecific content. After observing the students’ negotiations, the researchers conclude that there are three different patterns of revisions: (1) Students incorporate their peers’ comments (53%), (2) students do not employ what was discussed in the peer review to revise a certain part of their written texts (10%) and (3) students change a given part of their texts although it was not discussed (37%). Based on the result above, we suppose that most students include their peers’ comments in their texts because the majority of mistakes they made are common ones such as misspelling, wrong tense, wrong preposition, etc. Meanwhile, if the reviewers’ ideas cause a change in the content of the texts, the writers will ignore the comments. The same result may happen when the writers do not trust their peers. Sometimes, the writers themselves have to find out and correct their mistakes which their peers did not recognize in the peer reviews. Such mistakes are usually word choice, run-on sentences, dangling structures, and so forth. Besides, an additional investigation of the researchers show that the writers’ decisions to incorporate their peers’ comments in their texts are not considerably affected by the students’ fields of study. All the subjects in the study think that the peer review activity is beneficial because they actually want to have someone read the texts to find out the points the writers cannot see. Most of them like to read others’ written texts to learn some new ideas and to compare their works. However, some students don’t like to work with the ones who are from other fields of study. For that reason, we suggest that teachers should consider the students’ attitude toward choosing their peers when grouping them into peer dyads or peer response groups. Recently, many teachers have applied “peer review” to teaching academic writing because students increasingly want to show their activeness in studying. However, when this teaching method is employed, it brings some challenges to both instructors and learners. In his article “Improving Student Peer Feedback” (?), Lee Rain - Cantho University

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Writing 5 Linda B. Nilson states that “this type of feedback [peer feedback] has questionable validity, reliability, and accuracy, and instructors consider much of it too uncritical, superficial, vague and content-focused, among other things.”. In other words, students only focus on trivial problems/errors, on their agreement or disagreement and give comments unrelated to the requirement as well as unconstructive criticisms. Besides that, teachers usually pose yes/no questions or ones that evoke emotions in students in edit sheets. To solve these problems, Nilson offers a new kind of feedback item in which there are no yes/no questions as well as the ones that require students’ judgment (e.g. “Is the central idea clear throughout the paper?”) or opinion (e.g. “How strong is the evidence used to support the argument or viewpoint?”). Instead, some of the questions are tasks or mini-assignments, e.g. “List justifications or identify the strongest and the weakest evidence”, “Outline the work or list its main points”, respectively. Due to the new forms of the questions, students are expected to minimize the emotions in giving feedback to their peers’ texts. In addition, students should pay attention to details to pick out “the aspects of content, organization and mechanics in a paper”. That is, they have to read their peers’ texts three or more times. Moreover, students are required to be active in practicing the lessons about essay construction, argumentation, style, intended audience, and so forth. For all stated, we suggest that “peer review” is one of the latest and most useful teaching methods in ESL writing instruction. Nilson states that “There is no question that peer feedback can be very valuable to students, and that learning how to give and take it as a crucial lifelong skill”. Actually, being aware of the benefits of “peer review”, our teachers have been incorporating it in teaching writing to help us improve our mistake-recognizing and comment-giving skills. Although there are still some pitfalls in applying this method as mentioned above, we strongly think that by negotiating the solution together, instructors and learners can make it more effective.

Lee Rain - Cantho University

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