This paper examines the use of face-to-face peer review (FFPR) and computermediated peer review (CMPR) in an Asian English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) academic writing context. The participants were 33 English majors from a university of science and technology in Taiwan, a new type of school offering 2-year associate degree programs in foreign language studies. Our study contributes to the research on foreign-language-writing collaboration for Chinese learners in two important ways. First, many investigations of FFPR have looked at Chinese learners either in English as a second language (ESL) settings or at 4-year universities. Few have considered Chinese learners at 2-year colleges in EFL contexts. Second, there has been very little documentation of CMPR using annotation features in common word processing software in either ESL or EFL settings (Honeycutt, 2001). This study investigates the attitudes of 2-year college students in Taiwan toward the use of FFPR and CMPR in composition classes. Pedagogical implications are also drawn.
<p>This study investigates the use of face-to-face and computer-mediated peer review in an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) writing course to examine how different interaction modes affect comment categories, students’ revisions, and their perceptions of peer feedback. The participants were an intact class of 13 students at a Taiwanese university. The computer-mediated peer review involved <em>OnlineMeeting</em>, software specifically designed for peer review activities and featuring a split screen protocol, document sharing, and chat room functions. The results of chi-square tests show that overall students offered more revision-oriented comments than non-revision-oriented ones among different writing tasks in either mode. Also, peer review mode affected some types of peer comments to a certain extent. There were significantly more global alteration comments and fewer local alteration comments in face-to-face than computer-mediated mode. While the participants liked comments via <em>Word</em>’s annotation features over handwritten comments, they felt face-to-face discussions to be more effective than online chat via <em>OnlineMeeting</em> due to the affordance of face-to-face talk (e.g., immediacy and paralinguistic features), that cannot be easily replaced by electronic chat. Pedagogical implications regarding the balanced use of computer-mediated and non-computer-mediated writing activities are discussed, along with suggestions for future research.</p>
This study investigates research writing anxiety and self-efficacy beliefs among English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) graduate students in engineering-related fields. The relationship between the two writing affective constructs was examined and students' perspectives on research writing anxiety were also explored. A total of 218 survey responses from engineering graduate students at Taiwanese universities were analyzed, along with qualitative data from open-ended questions and semi-structured interviews. The findings show that while master's and doctoral students felt a similar moderate level of writing anxiety, senior doctoral students were more self-efficacious about writing research papers in English than their junior counterparts. Overall, students with higher writing self-efficacy felt less apprehensive. Additionally, among the individual variables, experience in writing for publication better predicted writing anxiety and self-efficacy than students' self-reported English proficiency and the number of writing courses taken. The qualitative findings indicated various sources of graduate-level writing anxiety, including insufficient writing skills in English, time constraints, and fear of negative comments. Furthermore, composing different sections of a research paper provoked different levels of anxiety due to the variations in the rhetorical purposes and discourse structures of particular sections. Implications on dealing with research writing anxiety are also discussed.
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