Student Engagement With Peer Feedback in L2 Writing: A Multiple Case Study of Chinese Secondary School Students

Abstract

While the past few decades have witnessed a growing body of research on peer feedback and student engagement, little attention has been paid to student engagement with peer feedback in the secondary school classrooms. Based on multiple qualitative data including semi-structured interviews, stimulated recall, original, revised and final writing drafts as well as peer discussion recordings, this case study investigated how secondary school students engaged with peer feedback in behavior, cognition, and affect from both the feedback giver’s and receiver’s perspectives and what factors may influence their engagement with peer feedback. Data analysis showed that 1) student engagement with both giving and receiving peer feedback demonstrated dynamic and complex interactions among three dimensions; 2) students were engaged with peer feedback in different ways while playing the roles of feedback givers and receivers, showing deep engagement as a giver and superficial engagement as a receiver, and vice versa; 3) factors such as language proficiency, self-efficacy, personality and teachers’ guidance were found to influence student engagement with peer feedback. By shedding light on the multi-dimensional characteristics of students’ engagement from bidirectional perspectives, the study offers suggestions for educational practitioners to improve English learners’ engagement with peer feedback in L2 writing classes.

E-peer feedback training on L2 writing: A case study of inexperienced learners

“…Indeed, the students had comments on the organization of ideas, but their comments on this issue were sketchy, and they seemed not to revise effectively in this sub-writing skill. This phenomenon was also found with EFL Chinese students in Fan and Xu's (2020) and Yan and Tang's (2023) studies, that students provided form-focused feedback by a large percentage. Based on the observations and interviews, this problem does not lie in the students' engagement; it lies in their writing abilities, their knowledge of L2, and previous experience of teacher feedback, which were also mentioned in Do and Phan (2023).…”

“…Regarding the content of the feedback, the rubric should be revised to be more specific. Poor writers usually follow the rules and instructions given by the instructor (Yan & Tang, 2023), which could be the reason for the phenomenon that happened in the first round. The students followed the general rubric for giving feedback (Appendix B), which resulted in vague and general comments.…”

“…Peer feedback is a pair or group activity in which students read, evaluate, and comment on each other's writing (Tsui & Ng, 2000;Zhang & Hyland, 2023). This collaborative activity has been widely studied in varied EFL and ESL contexts for decades and has been encouraged to be applied in teaching L2 writing (Vorobel & Kim, 2014;Yan & Tang, 2023). Notably, online peer feedback has become prevalent because of the technological advantages (Li & Hebert, 2023;Ma, 2022;Ting, 2023).…”

‘A Different Voice’ in Peer Feedback: Gender Specificity in Students’ Willingness to Provide Peer Feedback

“…Yet, it is not always accepted by students [23] and a negative attitude towards PFB also impairs the benefits it can bring [24,25]. The involvement of social interactions in peer feedback influences its outcomes in complex ways [12,21,26,27]: for instance, discomfort due to the fear of hurting a peer may diminish the motivation to participate in PFB [28], and peer pressure often impairs the reliability of the feedback [26,29]. Thus, this learning method suffers from both a gender bias and gender differences: the content of PFB is sometimes guided by the receiver's gender (gender bias) [30,31], and students' willingness and ways to provide PFB seems to be gender-dependent (gender difference).…”