The effect of instruction type and dyadic or individual emulation on the quality of higher-order peer feedback in EFL

Abstract

The effect of instruction type and dyadic or individual emulation on the quality of higher-order peer feedback in EFL van Steendam, E.; Rijlaarsdam, G.C.W.; Sercu, L.; van den Bergh, H. General rightsIt is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), other than for strictly personal, individual use, unless the work is under an open content license (like Creative Commons). Disclaimer/Complaints regulationsIf you believe that digital publication of certain material infringes any of your rights or (privacy) interests, please let the Library know, stating your reasons. In case of a legitimate complaint, the Library will make the material inaccessible and/or remove it from the website. Please Ask the Library: http://uba.uva.nl/en/contact, or a letter to: Library of the University of Amsterdam, Secretariat, Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam, The Netherlands. You will be contacted as soon as possible. AbstractStudies in peer feedback on written texts show that instruction in revision is necessary for the effectiveness of global feedback. Participants in the study were 247 university freshmen, native speakers of Dutch, who took the same Business English course, and were instructed a revision strategy following Schunk and Zimmerman's social cognitive model. Participants were first instructed through observation or practising, followed by dyadic or individual emulation, with the aim to determine the most effective combination of instruction and emulation for revision. Results showed a significant interaction of the above two factors. If emulation happens individually, then observation and practice are equally effective in terms of strategy acquisition. For dyadic emulation to be productive, it needs to be preceded by observation.

Peer reviewers learn from giving comments

“…Along with question prompts, instructors can provide students with a model of reviewing, which guides student reviewers to focus on micro-and macro-level meaning rather than surface features. Previous studies showed that observing a writing or revision model and emulating the model are much beneficial for novice writers (Couzijn 1999;Van Steendam et al 2010;Zimmerman and Kitsantas 2002). In addition, feedback on review comments may improve the quality of review (Cho and Schunn 2007).…”

“…However, it seems very interesting to analyze the writers' feedback in order to understand how the writers used the peer comments to guide their revisions. In addition, more research is needed to examine factors influencing the quality of peer reviewers' comments (e.g., Tsai and Liang 2009;Van Steendam et al 2010;Yang and Tsai 2010). It is crucial when designing peer review activities to understand conditions under which reviewers generate high-quality comments for peer authors and their own learning.…”

Exploring L2 writers' collaborative revision interactions and their writing performance

“…Research highlights some potential problems inherent in peer response practice and they lie in, Pre -print draft of paper in press for System, 2014 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2014.03.004 4  L2 writers' different attitudes and expectations towards collaboration and pair or group mechanisms (Carson & Nelson 1994  Learners' beliefs about the relative value of teacher and peer feedback (Morra & Romano, 2008;Nelson & Carson, 1998)  L2 learners' inability to detect errors, offer valid feedback, and lack of experience and unfamiliarity with peer evaluation technique (Tsui & Ng, 2000)  Lack of trust in their peers' writing skills and reservations to each other's advice (Rollinson, 2005;Yang et al, 2006) Failure to achieve the goals of peer evaluation is more likely to happen in contexts where learners have had limited formal exposure to writing skills training and have not yet developed adequate evaluative criteria for good writing. Learning to write on the one hand, and to evaluate on the other, is a dual agenda which may eventually lead to cognitive overload and frustration in novice writers (van Steendam et al, 2010). Therefore, teacher intervention, whether direct or indirect, may be needed at all stages of the writing process particularly when dealing with EFL students at lower levels of proficiency.…”

Peer assessment without assessment criteria

“…The promotion and valuing of peer learning (Slavin 1991) is a common motivation for implementing and studying peer assessment (Topping 2003;Gielen et al 2011;Kollar and Fischer, 2010;van Steendam et al 2010;van Zundert, Sluijsmans and van Merriënboer 2010). Peer assessment is often used to generate and evaluate evidence of typical peer learning activities such as team working, reflective thinking without the guidance of a teacher, and domain specific communication skills (Boud, Cohen and Sampson 1999).…”