EFL Arab Learners’ Peer Revision of Writing in a Facebook Group: Contributions to Written Texts and Sense of Online Community

Abstract

This qualitative study investigated peer writing revision among English as foreign language (EFL) Arab students in a Facebook group. Specifically, it aimed to identify the text revisions made by the learners and to determine their contributions to the learners' written texts and sense of online community outside the college classroom context. Being framed within the situated learning approach (Wenger, 1998), the current study was carried out among 14 EFL Arab university learners from Yemen, Algeria, Tunisia, Syria, Sudan and Egypt. A purposeful sampling was perfomed to achieve a heterogeneous group of EFL learners. A qualitative content analysis of the learners' written paragraphs (original and revised drafts), online interactional exchanges and responses to the post-revision reflection discussions was employed in this study. The findings showed that addition, substitution, deletion, permutation, consolidation, and distribution were identified as the main revision operations made by the EFL learners. These revisions operations and changes contributed to enhancing learners' end-products or texts in terms of content, unity and organization, language and mechanics. The learners' engagement in the online revision activities fostered their sense of online learning community by creating an interactive friendly learning environment, building and nurturing new relationships based on shared interests and developing a sense of belonging.

Exploring EFL Learners’ Comments on Web-Based Peer Feedback: Local and Global Revisions

“…The results also revealed that the majority of comments in both modes were on forms (local revision). These results matched those observed in earlier studies (Allen & Katayama, 2016;Hanjani & Li, 2014;Hsu, 2019;Kost, 2011;Nami & Marandi, 2014;Razak & Saeed, 2015) that students offered more comments on grammar, lexical resources, and mechanics like punctuation and capitalization. However, the current study's findings did not support the previous studies (Arnold et al, 2009;Bradley et al, 2010;Kessler, 2009;Kessler et al, 2012;Ma, 2020;Saeed & Ghazali, 2017), which indicated more emphasis on content than forms.…”

“…Their study stressed that students produced more feedback on linguistic features like grammar and punctuation than on content and style. Razak and Saeed (2015) conducted qualitative research aimed to investigate online peer feedback among Arab EFL learners. The study targeted a heterogeneous group of 14 Arab university students from six countries: Egypt, Algeria, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, and Tunisia.…”

Transferring Skills from Classroom to Professional Writing: Student-Faculty Peer Review as an Extension of Cognitive Apprenticeship

“…Two students who provided little feedback on the article noted that difficulties with content prevented them from a lengthier peer review. This is supported by other studies that find content peer review is a difficult task for students (Patchan et al, 2011;Razak and Saeed, 2015), suggesting that students' confidence with content knowledge may remain a challenge to using peer review as a tool for cognitive apprenticeship.…”

“…For example, an online English-learning community provides an opportunity for students to collaboratively revise writing in a non-classroom context Saeed, 2014, 2015). Here, the majority of peer review comments reflect language changes while content comments are less common (Razak and Saeed, 2015). This is not surprising, as content comments are difficult to make in the sciences as well (Patchan et al, 2011).…”

Should Peer E-Comments Replace Traditional Peer Comments?

“…Training students how to provide qualified comments was an essential issue in the Academic writing classrooms (Pham & Usaha, 2016;Tuzi, 2004). Finally, regarding the writing outcomes when employed Facebook for students to conduct their commentaries in the writing classrooms, many researchers (Dizon, 2016;Razak & Saeed, 2015;Suthiwartnarueput & Wasanasomsithi, 2012;Hoang & Nguyen, 2016;Shih, 2011;and Yusof, et al, 2012) found that employing Facebook as a platform for peer comment activities would help students improve their writing skills. Some researchers also found that using Facebook for peer comment activities helped students enhance their grammatical accuracy (Suthiwartnarueput & Wasanasomsithi, 2012;Wichadee, 2013;Dizon, 2016), their writing styles (Razak & Saeed, 2015), as well as their writing fluency (Dizon, 2016).…”