Peer Reviewing Across the Atlantic: Patterns and Trends in L1 and L2 Comments Made in an Asynchronous Online Collaborative Learning Exchange Between Technical Communication Students in Sweden and in the United States

Abstract

In a globally networked learning environment (GNLE), 16 students at a university in Sweden and 17 students at a university in the United States exchanged peer-review comments on drafts of assignments they prepared in English for their technical communication classes. The instructors of both sets of students had assigned the same projects and taught their courses in the same way that they had in the previous year, which contrasts with the common practice of having students in partnering courses work on the same assignment or on linked assignments created specifically for the GNLE. The authors coded the students’ 816 comments according to their focus and orientation in order to investigate the possible differences between the comments made by the L2 students in Sweden and those made by the L1 (English as a second language) students in the United States, the possible impact of peer reviewing online, and the influence of the instructors’ directions on the students’ peer-reviewing behavior.

A review of previous studies on ESL/EFL learners’ interactional feedback exchanges in face-to-face and computer-assisted peer review of writing

“…Nevertheless, the results of both studies by Liang (2008Liang ( , 2010 still support the role of synchronous feedback interactions in facilitating learners' attention to content more than meanings and grammar errors. Yet, this contradicts results of other two studies Anderson et al, 2010& Chang, 2010 showing that learners produced a higher number of local comments focusing on the language issues.…”

“…Findings of most previous studies support the role of peer feedback identifying macro-level or global issues of writing, including the task of criticizing writing (Sullivan & Pratt, 1996), ideas or content (Di Giovanni & Nagaswami, 2001;Hewett, 2006;Jones et al, 2006;Anderson et al, 2010;Saeed & Ghazali, Global aspects of their texts such as organization of ideas, consistency of ideas and clarity of ideas and local aspects of texts including form-based issues as vocabulary, using information from L1 sources in L2 writing, and mechanics such as punctuation and formatting. Sullivan and Pratt (1996) More comments on the task of criticizing the writing.…”

“…Out of the 37 reviewed studies, 15 previous studies focused on FFPR only (Stanley, 1992;Beason, 1993;Mendonca & Johnson, 1994;Lockhart & Ng, 1995;Zhu, 1995;Mendonca & Johnson, 1994;Villamil & De Guerrero, 1996;McGroarty & Zhu, 1997;De Guerrero & Villamil, 2000;Zhu, 2001;Min, 2005;Cho & Cho, 2011;Lina & Samuel, 2013;Vorobel & Kim, 2014;Hanjani & Li, 2014). On the other hand, an equal number of studies (N = 15) concentrated on CAPR only (Tuzi, 2004;Hewett, 2006;Guardado & Shi, 2007;Liang, 2008Liang, , 2010Liou & Peng, 2009;Ho & Usaha, 2009;Anderson, Bergman, Bradley, Gustafsson, & Matzke, 2010;Cha & Park, 2010;Ho, 2010;Ho & Usaha, 2013;Bradley, 2014;Razak & Saeed, 2014;Pham & Usaha, 2015;Saeed & Ghazali, 2016). Other remaining studies (N = 7) combined both FFPR and CAPR (Sullivan & Pratt, 1996;Di Giovanni & Nagaswami, 2001;Liu & Sadler, 2003;Jones et al, 2006;Song & Usaha, 2009;Chang, 2012;Ho, 2015).…”

“…In this regard, of these 22 studies, most of them(N = 12) used asynchronous CAPR only (Sullivan & Pratt, 1996;Tuzi, 2004;Liou & Peng, 2009;Ho & Usaha, 2009;Song & Usaha, 2009;Ho, 2010;Ho & Usaha, 2013;Bradley, 2014;Razak & Saeed, 2014;Ho, 2015;Pham & Usaha, 2015;Saeed & Ghazali, 2016). However, 6 studies employed synchronous CAPR only (Hewett, 2006;Jones et al, 2006;Anderson et al, 2010;Liang, 2008Liang, , 2010Cha & Park, 2010), and other studies (N = 4) used a combination of both synchronous and asynchronous CAPR (Di Giovanni & Nagaswami, 2001;Liu & Sadler, 2003;Guardado & Shi, 2007;Chang, 2012).…”

“…Out of the 37 reviewed studies, 30 studies identified and reported various patterns of learners' exploratory interactional feedback exchanges in peer review. However, other seven studies (Guardado & Shi, 2007;Liang, 2008Liang, , 2010Anderson et al, 2010;Cho & Cho, 2011;Vorobell & Kim, 2014;Pham & Usaha, 2015) were exclusive to the focus areas of learners' interactional exchanges in peer review. Based on our analysis of the findings of these studies, there are three patterns of interactional feedback exchanges: (1) exploratory, (2) procedural and (3) social which are discussed as follows:…”