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L2 Students' Perceptions and Practices of both Giving and Receiving
Online Peer-Feedback
Richard Cassidy* (Seowon University)
Daniel Bailey** (Konkuk University Glocal Campus)
Cassidy, Richard & Bailey, Daniel (2018). L2 students' perceptions and practice of both giving and receiving
online peer-feedback . Multimedia-Assisted Language Learning, 21(1), 11-34.
Citing a lack of discussion about the particular effect of giving peer feedback, this study of student
perceptions and actual practice seeks to map out and account rather for the benefits afforded by both sides
of the online peer review process. A group of 61 university English education majors completed seven
peer-to-peer (P2P) process writing tasks during one semester and then completed an in-house developed
P2P perceptions questionnaire. Results suggest encouraging continuities between the peer review practice
itself and its role in alleviating student writing anxieties. In so doing, the study hopes to provide a better
understanding of the training students need in order to benefit from computer assisted collaborative
learning activities such as P2P writing tasks. While students proved able to focus on a wide range of
different grammar, content, and organizational aspects of their peer’s work, they appeared also to enjoy the
responsibility of helping one another improve their writing. Furthermore, they reported a larger number of
higher-level improvements associated with the giving part of the peer review process than with the feedback
received. Finally, this accounting of student perceptions the peer review process correlate positively with an
analysis of their actual peer comments, and provide therefore insight into the language learning strategy
training afforded by the P2P process as well as into its mitigating effects on L2 writing anxiety.
Key words Second language acquisition, academic writing, peer-to-peer feedback, blended-learning, lan-
guage learning strategies, L2 writing anxiety
doi: 10. 15702/mall.2018.21.1.11
* Richard Cassidy would like to acknowledge the support and encouragement provided by Professor Hahn Hye-Ryeong of
Seowon University. This project would not have been born without her.
** Corresponding author: Daniel Bailey.
Multimedia-Assisted Language Learning
21(1) 11-34
12
L2 Students' Perceptions and Practices of both Giving and Receiving Online Peer-Feedback
I. INTRODUCTION
Researchers have done much to record the value of direct and indirect, local and global, as
well as formative and summative forms of feedback. Indeed, measurements have been taken of
students’ perceptions and of the relative effect of feedback provided by instructors and peers in
both online and traditional pen and paper settings. This diversity in corrective feedback studies
has allowed researchers to outline a range of recommendations about the varied conditions
under which such feedback may be beneficial and desirable.
Much of that work, however, has missed opportunities to highlight the specific
contributions of a student’s practice of giving feedback specifically, as distinct from their receiving
it simply from peers and professors. With some exceptions (Cho & Cho, 2010; Lundstrom &
Baker, 2009; Min, 2016), much of the conversation about the forms of peer feedback and its
effect on L2 writing practice has been limited by an inexplicably goal- or product-oriented
vision of the writing process and so on the kinds of feedback students find it useful to receive
in the course of a writing cycle. Acknowledging that the production of a better final draft is a
significant achievement in itself, the current study interrogates the act and effect of giving
feedback also, asking about the extent to which providing comment on a peer’s work may
represent an occasion to improve the feedback-provider’s own writing and L2 learning
strategies. Indeed, the current study hopes to fill the gap in the literature by emphasizing the
importance of both giving and receiving P2P feedback. Thus, this study seeks to remind its
community that providing peer feedback is in and of itself a writing task that can influence
writing goals, skills, and performance.
II. LITERATURE REVIEW
While Truscott’s (1996) critique of certain forms of feedback sounds damning, it has not
gone unchallenged (Bruton, 2009; Chandler, 2003; Ferris, 1999; 2004). Nor, most importantly,
does Truscott’s own critique summarily dismiss the potential benefit of every form of feedback
whatsoever. Indeed, in Truscott’s (2007) paper on the effects of error correction, he insists that
“no one, to my knowledge, recommends [...] providing no feedback at all” (p. 258). Instead, he
asks about the sorts of feedback that might allow students to write more accurately (p. 262) and
in more “realistic ways” for more “communicative purposes” (p. 270). The goal of our study is
to contribute to a better understanding of how online peer provided written corrective
Richard Cassi dy․Daniel Bailey
13
feedback (WCF) may indeed help achieve such greater levels of writing quality and complexity.
Notwithstanding those studies that support Truscott’s critique (in Liu & Lee, 2014), there
remains a wealth of other research showing how different forms of WCF can be beneficial
(Berg, 1999; Pearce, Mulder, & Baik, 2009). Indeed, there is an increasing body of research in
L2 WCF which takes into consideration the range and shifting perceptions of peer feedback
processes (Moore & Teather, 2013), the relative value of teacher versus peer feedback (Patchen,
Schunn, & Clark, 2011), and the effect of online versus in person learning environments (Liou
& Peng, 2009). Moreover, studies have sought to identify and articulate a range of different
benefits, including improvements in actual performance (Moore & Teather, 2013; Mulder, Baik,
Naylor, & Pearce, 2014), as well as a number of higher order benefits that have less to do with
improvements in final drafts than with language learning strategy training directed toward the
development of increasingly self-regulated learners (Kim, 2013; Liu & Hansen, 2002; Nicol &
MacFarlane-Dick, 2006).
Nevertheless, there remains a recurrent tendency throughout the extent WCF literature to
avoid any explicit measure or discussion of the benefits of the giving side of the peer review
equation. As students cannot by definition get feedback from one another without at the same
time giving it, neither can the benefit of a peer review be attributed only to the comments
received from peers. And yet, a great number of studies in both L1 and L2 contexts fail even to
make that important distinction between giving and receiving (Althauser & Darnall, 2001;
Mulder et al., 2014; Pearce et al., 2009), and where they do, they fail to elaborate (Ballantyne,
Hughes & Mylonas, 2002; Patchen et al, 2011; Van den Berg, Admiraal, & Pilot, 2006). For
example, while So and Lee (2014) describe results showing that students’ perceptions were
good and that peer review
–
both giving and receiving was thought to be useful and helpful,
no obvious effort was made to study, or even discuss as such, the particular effect of students’
producing feedback, at least not beyond the references students had made to the anxiety they
felt about wanting to provide good feedback or to the particular focus of the feedback they
provided (e.g., grammar, vocabulary, organization, etc.). Thus, readers are right to feel surprised
when Moore and Teather (2013) suggest that the benefits of giving P2P feedback have been
“acknowledged by many” (p. 9), for the challenge of adequately addressing such presumed
benefits remains far from overcome.
Nevertheless, and rare though they may sometimes seem, studies that do speak to the way
in which the process of giving peer feedback can itself be beneficial are not for that matter
inexistent. An often-cited study by Lundstrom and Baker (2009) insists that, in an L2 context,
“to give is better than to receive” peer feedback. Likewise, Tsui and Ng (2000) used a
14
L2 Students' Perceptions and Practices of both Giving and Receiving Online Peer-Feedback
post-treatment survey to investigate student perceptions of giving feedback in their study of the
relative number and quality of revisions based on teacher or peer feedback, finding that
students overall appreciated the benefits that resulted. In a similar investigation, Wood and
Kurzel (2008) shared the preliminary results of a study of L1 Media Arts students that confirm
suggestions that students recognize the connection between providing peer review and their
ability to better reflect on, and so improve on, the quality of their own assignments.
Cho and Cho (2010) and Cho and MacArthur (2011) provide two of the most vocal and
detailed arguments in favor of what they call the learning writing by reviewing hypothesis (2011,
p.74). Cho and Cho (2010), first of all, focused on the effect of different types of comments
given by peers on the quality of the commenter’s own writing, finding that students learned
more by giving than receiving, and learned more by giving meaning-oriented peer feedback
than they did from providing only surface-level comments. They note, also, that more research
is needed into what students actually learn by giving comments. Cho and MacArthur (2011),
likewise, cite literature referring to a persistent “lack of trust” in the peer review process (p. 73),
noting that peer review is the least studied practice now commonly used, and they conclude
that the benefits witnessed by their L1 participants depended not only on reading peer texts but
on actively rating or commenting on them.
Alongside such calls for increasingly precise and detailed accounts of what quality peer
feedback actually looks like (Moore & Teather, 2013; Nelson & Schunn, 2009), the increasing
interest in L2 peer review processes, lately, has turned to focusing more attention to the
importance and effect of familiarizing students with the steps involved in their providing
effective P2P WCF (Min, 2005, 2006, 2016; Rollinson, 2005; Vickerman, 2009; Yang & Meng,
2013).
The current study aims to provide results that invite us to look forward to further
developments in these directions, namely, (a) towards a better understanding of what students
themselves would define as the nature of useful and desirable feedback, and (b) even further
towards a better sense of how best to train L2 students to provide that for one another directly.
III. METHOD
1. Research Questions
The purpose of this study was to report on students’ perceptions and actual practice of both
Richard Cassi dy․Daniel Bailey
15
receiving and giving written peer reviews in a blended learning environment and to describe the
benefits of such a practice in both quantitative and qualitative terms. Thus, the peer review
process that we report on was designed to test the hypothesis that a peer review process is all
the more likely to be worth the investment of time and effort involved as both providing and
receiving feedback are emphasized by instructors. Indeed, this study posits that, beyond the
disputed benefit of receiving this or that sort of feedback from peers or instructors and in one
form or another, arguably, the more students are made to read, reflect on, and write about the
specifics of their peers’ written work, the more likely they are to develop a habit of paying the
same beneficial sort of critical attention to their own writing. To gain a fuller understanding of
the role of both giving and receiving online P2P WCF on weekly writing assignments, the
following research questions were asked:
1) How do students perceive the process of both giving and receiving peer feedback?
2) How, in their own terms, do the students describe the utility, desirability, and effect of
giving peer feedback?
3) How does the students’ actual practice of peer reviewing correspond to and support (or
not) their perceptions of that experience?
2. Participants
The study recruited a group of 61 Junior and Senior Education majors from a university in
South Korea attending a required Critical Thinking and Logical Writing class in the spring of
2015. Their L2 proficiency ranged from A2 to B2 of the Common European Framework of
Reference (CEFR), after an average of 12 years of formal English education training. Familiarity
with computer technology generally, and with the course LMS in particular, given its use in
courses throughout their 4-year program, meant that no explicit training was required for
students to be able to post assignments and comments online.
3. Treatment
The 15-week treatment involved writing seven short-essay responses to sample questions of
opinion, literature, and pedagogy taken from previous editions of the National Teacher
Certification exam (the im-yong huboja seonjeong gyeongjaeng siheom or im-yong gosi for short). Each
16
L2 Students' Perceptions and Practices of both Giving and Receiving Online Peer-Feedback
assignment required students in small groups to brainstorm and outline responses during class
time while the instructor circulated around the room, providing assistance as needed. The
writing process entailed receiving the assignment on Tuesday, posting their first draft by Friday,
uploading feedback to at least two peers by Sunday, and then re-submitting their final draft on
the Monday. This whole process of drafting, giving and receiving peer comments, and
redrafting occurred asynchronously on the course LMS.
Alongside the in-class discussion of the next writing assignments, the instructor projected
weekly feedback on common or recurring student errors and difficulties, as well as examples of
alternately useful (and not), because specific (or not) peer responses taken from the previous
weeks’ writing cycles. However, as we describe below, no more in-depth or sustained training
was provided students about how to peer-review (cf. Min, 2016, for a sample of what in-depth
and sustained might refer to).
4. Post-Treatment Survey
An in-house developed survey was administered at the end of the semester in order to
better understand the students’ perceptions of their online P2P feedback interventions.
Specifically, the survey sought to measure student perceptions of (1) the peer feedback they
received, (2) the feedback they provided, (3) the relative utility of teacher and peer feedback,
and (4) the different foci of students’ critical attention when writing their own and when
commenting on each other’s assignments. The survey was composed of a combination of
dichotomous (yes/no) items and 6-point Likert-scale items, as well as a set of open-ended
questions (Appendix 1). The choice of a 6-point Likert-scale was motivated by the desire to
have respondents commit to either a positive or negative impression.
5. Peer-Comment Samples
Prior to the study, the students were asked to take a pretest that comprised an essay writing
test, two vocabulary tests, and an attitude questionnaire. The writing test required them to write
a minimum of 300 words to the following prompt: If you were the principal of a private school,
which kind of teacher would you prefer to hire: an inexperienced teacher at a lower salary or an
experienced teacher at a higher salary? Provide specific reasons and details to support your
answer. They were allowed to spend 30 minutes to complete the task.
Then, their essays were evaluated by two raters who had expertise in both L2 writing and
Richard Cassi dy․Daniel Bailey
17
applied linguistics. Both of them had taught English writing for over 10 years, and each of them
was in charge of a writing center at their institution. To prevent possibilities for prejudicial
rating, the student writing samples were number coded and presented without any student
information. When rating, they referred to the public version of the IELTS 9-band scoring
guide. They provided scores for the following four categories: task achievement, coherence and
cohesion, lexical resources, and grammatical range and accuracy. The four scores were summed
up and then averaged to yield the final scores for individuals, which were then analyzed to
examine changes in wring proficiency over time.
[Figure 1] Example of peer comments
The following two examples were chosen to illustrate what was described as potentially useful
peer comments, given how they refer explicitly to specific aspects of their peer’s writing:
Excerpt 1
Hi [...], I think your assignment is easy to understand, and you use various kinds of conjunctions. But
[in] the last part of your assignment, I want [you to] restate what you said in your introduction. Thank
you :)
Excerpt 2
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L2 Students' Perceptions and Practices of both Giving and Receiving Online Peer-Feedback
Hi [...] nice to read your assignment. I feel you are doing just fine so don’t worry too much [...] I cannot
understand why you wrote 'however' after 'most of all' at the beginning of your second sentence. Except
that, yours looks good. I can understand what are you talking about and the things that u want to
emphasize. Thank you! keep trying hard!
6. Data Analysis
This study analyzed both quantitative and qualitative data in order to better understand
participants’ perceptions and practice of both giving and receiving peer feedback. Three types
of data were analyzed, including the closed and open ended survey items, and the set of actual
peer review comments collected throughout the semester. The statistical software package SPSS
23.0 was used to generate mean score comparisons describing self-reported perceptions of the
online peer review process. Due to the non-normally distributed data, the Friedman test was
administered to identify differences in areas of focus (e.g., grammar, vocabulary, organization)
associated with receiving and giving feedback, respectively. The Wilcoxon Sign-Ranks Test was
used to compare areas of focus between receiving and giving feedback. Finally, a double-blind
process of textual analysis was used to code and compare the series of recurrent themes present
throughout both the open-ended survey responses and the peer review comments.
IV. RESULTS
In the following section, we report on our descriptive analysis of the students’ perceptions
of their online peer review experience. The analysis, moreover, seeks to situate students’ overall
perceptions of the process as a whole in the context of their actual practice, first, by describing
the relation between the focus of students’ attention when writing their own assignments and
when reviewing each other’s work and, second, by accounting for the amount of extra writing
done by students in the course of the whole semester’s worth of peer reviewing.
1. RQ1: Post-Treatment Survey Results
Survey responses show students appreciated both the giving and receiving side of the peer
feedback process. All but eight of the 61 students reported learning something from the
Richard Cassi dy․Daniel Bailey
19
[Table 1] Rank order of focus in writing assignments and peer-comments
In peer review In their own writing Wilcoxon
MSDRank
order
MSDRank
order
zp
Content 4.22 1.19 2 4.29 1.48 2 0.231 .818
Organization 4.29 1.49 3 4.94 1.42 1 3.058 .002**
Grammar 4.59 1.45 1 4.20 1.25 3 1.667 .095
Vocabulary 3.37 1.21 4 3.35 0.89 4 0.253 .800
Style 2.98 1.34 5 2.90 1.30 5 0.809 .419
Note: alpha = .05/5 = .01*, .01/5 = .002**; n = 58
process of reading their peers’ work every week indicating overall positive views. Furthermore,
all but six responded that they had made changes to their first draft as a result of the overall
peer-review process (Item 4: M = 4.95, SD = 1.16). More specifically, a majority of students
(95%) valued the feedback received from peers (Item 2: M = 4.55, SD = 0.77), and most (86%)
made changes to their drafts consequently (Item 5: M = 4.56, SD = 1.05). Moreover, 60 percent
of students found peer-comments as useful as the instructor’s (Item 7: M = 3.76, SD = 1.08).
A similarly positive trend was found among student responses to questions about the act of
giving feedback, specifically. As such, 89 percent of students agreed with the statement that
online peer review feedback helped them improve their own writing (Item 3: M = 4.41, SD =
0.75) and 60 percent reported making actual improvements to their own drafts as a result of the
comments that they themselves had given their peers (Item 6: M = 3.79, SD = 1.05).
When forced to make an either/or selection, students not surprisingly preferred receiving (n
= 38) to giving (n = 13) feedback (Item 1), but then were found to value both receiving (M =
4.55, SD = 0.78) and giving feedback (M = 4.41, SD = 0.75) almost equally when asked to
evaluate each independently (Items 2 and 3). These results indicate that the process of giving
peer feedback was thought by students to be at least as beneficial as its reception, suggesting
that more effort and attention should be invested in better understanding the effect of both
giving and receiving feedback on the development of students’ writing skills.
To gain a more holistic understanding of the online peer review process, the answer to research
question one includes also a description of the perceived utility, desirability, and effect of both
giving and receiving online peer review feedback. A set of results showing the students’ tendency to
focus on the same aspects of the L2, both, when providing feedback to their peers and when writing
their own assignments are displayed in Table 1.
The areas of focus here, in both contexts, were content, organization, grammar, style, and
20
L2 Students' Perceptions and Practices of both Giving and Receiving Online Peer-Feedback
vocabulary. A first non-parametric Friedman test of differences among areas of the students’
focus when giving P2P feedback was administered, returning a Chi-square value of 33.193,
which is significant (p < .001). A post hoc comparison, using the Wilcoxon Signed-Ranks Test
revealed that the students’ focus on content, organization, and grammar was greater than on
either vocabulary or style, and at a statistically significant level (p < .001). A second Friedman
test was then conducted to define the students’ areas of focus in relation to their own writing,
which produced a likewise significant Chi-square value of 46.211 (p < .001). The post hoc
Wilcoxon Signed-Ranks analysis revealed a similarly significant and greater level of focus on
content, organization, and grammar than style and vocabulary (p < .001).
Noting that students, in this sense, were largely focused on the same aspects of L2 writing
when writing their own and when commenting on their peers’ assignments, it is useful to
remark on how much extra time they actually spent on the shared task of improving their
writing skills. As such, we note that the 61 students wrote a total of 42,924 extra words over the
course of the semester in the form of 799 peer comments, averaging 17 comments each and 54
words per comment. This means that the peer review process allowed students to produce 703
extra written words over the course of the semester, which is equivalent to approximately three
assignments’ worth of extra writing practice. These results suggest not only that students felt
positive about the peer review process, generally, and about the giving part of the process in
particular, but that it allowed them to focus on the quality of a significant amount of extra
writing over the course of this online collaborative writing task.
2. RQ2:Analysis of Open-Ended Items
In response to research question two, our study sought to describe student perceptions of
the utility, desirability, and effect of giving online peer feedback, and to provide therefore a
deeper understanding of how online collaborative writing tasks like peer reviewing might affect
students’ writing skills. To that end, our analysis endeavored to identify relevant themes
recurring throughout the students’ responses to the seven open-ended survey questions (Items
11-17), the first being a very consistent sense of what useful and desirable might mean in this
context.
An initial review of results indicate that students found themselves able to refer to a wide
range of different local, global, and meta level areas of interest and improvement. Presumed
“local improvements”, here, were coded as sentence level issues like grammar and vocabulary,
Richard Cassi dy․Daniel Bailey
21
while the “global” category were meant to refer to paragraph level issues like organization and
content. “Meta” level issues and improvements, finally, refer to learning strategies more
broadly, to such practices as using a dictionary, rereading one’s work before submitting it,
considering the audience’s point of view when writing, and assessing changes in one’s own
performance over time. In the paragraphs that follow, we provide further examples of each
different sort of challenge or improvement, and we can report, in response to question two,
that students maintained a very consistent definition of what useful and desirable peer feedback
actually looks like.
1) Useful Peer Review
In response to questions about the most useful kinds of comments received (Items 13 and
14), students reported appreciating local level feedback about grammar and vocabulary from
their peers but global types of feedback from the instructor (e.g., paragraph logic, concision and
cohesion). That difference notwithstanding, students were consistent in describing, as useful,
the very “detailed” nature of whatever sort of comments they’d received. Indeed, they insisted
on the utility of feedback that was both “easy to understand” and pointing them towards actual
“solutions” or “alternatives”. A useful comment here is taken to mean a useable one; in other
words, a comment that leads to action on the part of the student receiving it.
When asked to describe the sorts of comments students especially disliked receiving and
giving (Items 15 and 16, respectively), the same overarching theme appeared. Indeed, as many
as 20 percent of respondents left the line blank in response to items 15 (n = 12/58) and 16 (n =
19/58), suggesting that there were no sorts of comments that they explicitly disliked getting or
giving. A similar number of respondent’s also stated directly that there was “nothing” about
their peer’s comments, or their own, that they disliked (Items 15: n = 18/58, and 16: n =
12/58). These responses indicate that students were indeed motivated by the opportunity to
improve their writing and goal-oriented in their engagement with the peer review task.
The only notable exception to this level of appreciation was the students’ repeated reports
of their disliking feedback received (Item 15) that was too “vague” or too “general”. Indeed,
they resented getting responses that were not easily or directly actionable, or that they did not
immediately or easily know how to apply, such as feedback that said only “your essay is good”
or “your concluding sentence is weak and needs to be stronger”, without then following up
with suggestions about how, precisely, to improve. Likewise, in terms of the peer feedback they
gave, they disliked feeling unhelpful or useless (Item 16). Thus, they seemed to resent having to
22
L2 Students' Perceptions and Practices of both Giving and Receiving Online Peer-Feedback
comment on assignments in which there was an evident lack of effort invested on the part of
the writer in the first place, and so disliked having to provide feedback on essays that had “too
many errors” in them, or errors that were either too tricky to provide clear solutions for or were
not within the commenter’s own perceived capacity to fix. Similarly, students disliked being
faced with assignments that somehow seemed “too perfect” for them to be able to help
improve. As we discuss below, this latter sort of comment should not be taken to mean that the
peer review process is inappropriate for lower level students, but rather that more in-depth
forms of peer-review training is required, particularly for less skilled or less confident writers.
2) Reported Improvements
latter sort of com. In response to the survey question about what students learned simply
from reading their peers’ work (Item 17), students reported gaining added perspective on their
own L2 writing. In phrases that recall different social and metacognitive learning strategies
commonly measured by instruments like Oxford’s (1990) Strategy Inventory for Language
Learning, students describe themselves developing an improved ability to assess the strengths
and weaknesses of their own writing as well as an improved awareness of other ways of
thinking and writing when approaching an L2 writing assignment. As one student put it, “I
could learn how they organize differently with the same topic [as me].” Furthermore,
perceptions of how their own writing has improved as a result of the peer feedback they had
received and given (Items 11 and 12, respectively) allow us to greatly thicken this increasingly
detailed descriptions of the perceived benefits of this peer review process generally, and of the
relative difference between giving and receiving in particular.
Indeed, students described (Item 11) a wide range of both local and global level
improvements resulting, for example, from the simpler sentence structures recommended by
their peers, the use of better (or fewer) details, and the more effective paraphrasing of their
arguments in conclusion. Moreover, and recalling again Oxford’s (1990) categorizing of
different language learning strategies, students reported such ‘meta’ level improvements as an
increased awareness of their audience or of the cultural differences between English and Korea,
which made their own thinking more flexible, with one student stating, ”My writing [became]
more fluent, persuasive and more native like.”
Likewise, when it came to the perceived benefits resulting from the process of giving peer
feedback (Item 12), students reported the same wide range of improvements, including such
global level gains in their ability to see the overall structure of their own text, to write more
Richard Cassi dy․Daniel Bailey
23
efficiently, therefore, and to better concentrate on the assignment in question. Further, students
in general reported meta-level gains in their awareness and use of cognitive, metacognitive,
affective, and social learning strategies (Oxford, 1990). For instance, students described how
providing peer feedback helped them realize the necessity of using a dictionary when they write
or of thinking more about their assignments before starting or handing them in. They referred
also to an improved metacognitive ability to imagine and consider other people’s points of
view, be more strategic, plan more, and assess their own writing better.
Most striking though is the apparent variation and distribution of such different sorts of
improvements according to whether students were referring to the effects of feedback given or
received. As Figure 2 shows, students cited an overall larger number of local (than global or
meta) level improvements resulting from the peer feedback process generally (local, n = 53 vs.
global and meta, combined, n = 43), which is perhaps to be expected given that students’, as we
have seen, reported a marked desire to be useful and to make a difference (Items 13-16).
However, while they attributed a greater number of local and global (assignment) level gains to
the feedback they had received (local: from receiving, n = 30 and from giving n = 23; and
global: from receiving, n = 13 and from giving n = 11), they attributed more than twice as
many meta level (learning strategy) gains to the process of giving than to their receiving of peer
feedback (meta: from receiving, n = 6 and from giving, n = 13).
[Figure 2] Overall Writing Anxiety
Therefore, in response to our second research question about how students describe the
utility and benefit of giving and receiving peer feedback, respectively, we find that not only do
students appear to have a very clear sense of what useful or desirable feedback looks like and
does for them, they attribute a proportionately greater number of higher level improvements to
24
L2 Students' Perceptions and Practices of both Giving and Receiving Online Peer-Feedback
the peer comments they gave than to the comments they received. In other words, it would
seem that, from the students’ perspective, higher level benefits may be more often derived from
the giving than from the receiving of peer-feedback.
3. RQ3: Discourse Analysis of Actual Peer Comments
Much may be lost, therefore, in our conversations about the peer-review process when we
limit it to nothing more than the students’ understanding and use of feedback received, either
from peers or instructors. However, because there can remain a difference between what is
reported by students and what in practice they actually do, we turn now to answering research
question three, comparing student perceptions and actual practice by coding and comparing
themes emerging from a double-blind discourse analysis of a second set of qualitative data
drawn from a selection of actual peer review comments collected over the course of the term
from each of the seven process writing assignments. Because that data set of 42,924 words and
799 peer comments was prohibitively large for this particular project, sample comments were
collected from amongst the students who had agreed or strongly agreed with both items 3 and
6, indicating they had both learned from giving feedback to their peers and that they had made
changes to their own writing as a consequence. Limited though this selection must be, it is felt
that those students who were reportedly most aware of benefits presumed to result from
providing peer reviews would likely provide the most illustrative examples. The following four
themes were identified in that sub-set of peer comments and these are compared to the overall
perceptions gathered by the survey responses described in the paragraphs above.
1) Being Specific with Feedback and Providing Alternatives
Five recurrent behaviors were identified through analysis of the peer review comments. As
suggested by their response to the open-ended survey questions, about useful and desirable
comments, students were indeed capable of being specific in the feedback they offered about a
wide range of issues, including vocabulary choices and local grammar problems (like
conjunctions and pronoun use) and global level issues (like confusions with paragraph logic,
weak or uninspiring conclusions, a lack of supporting details, and a need to provide better
examples).
Moreover, they seemed also inclined to offer solutions and alternatives about a variety of
both local and global level difficulties with grammar, spelling, vocabulary, and sentence length.
Richard Cassi dy․Daniel Bailey
25
Other solutions offered in their peer comments included feedback about the content of a peer’s
summary, the examples their peers had provided, and the overall organization of their essay.
This confirms results found by Cho and Cho (2010), however across a wider range of
assignment-cycles, regarding how low-level Korean students involved in a one-on-one peer
review setting are able, given the right conditions, to provide a range of specific comments
about different aspects of English writing.
2) Areas of Focus
Also reminiscent of the perceptions reported above, students often repeated similar
comments to different peers about the same aspects of the L2. One student, for example,
corrected several peers’ mistaken use of conjunctions like “so” at the beginning of a sentence,
while other students were seen to repeatedly request more “examples” or to suggest that
different peers should add more of the same “because phrases” to their arguments. In these
cases, it seemed that the students were focused on aspects of the L2 that they felt confident
speaking to, perhaps, as a result of having discussed the issue in class. Though it is beyond the
scope of this study to do so, it would be interesting to look back at the commenter’s own
writing progress to see whether (or not) they were in fact avoiding those same sorts of mistakes
themselves.
At other times, it seemed that the repeated focus of a student’s peer comments served as an
opportunity to consolidate (or even produce) knowledge for themselves about an aspect of the
L2 that they hadn’t yet fully mastered on their own. For example, when one clearly motivated
student provided the same comment in response to three of her peers’ assignments regarding
their use of an unnecessarily complicated or repetitive sentence structure, this particular
reviewer appeared to be rather confident about the lesson she was passing on to her peers.
However, when she wrote to a fourth peer, about the very same sentence structure, it is clear
that she has not yet in fact fully mastered it. Starting with a compliment about her relatively
more advanced peer’s ability to manage the same kind of complex structure successfully, she
adds that “I need to remember that when I write my work later” (emphasis added). These
examples suggest that students are just as likely to be helping themselves improve as they are
involved in helping one another.
3) Affective Learning
Thus far, such peer review practices triangulate well with the quantitative and qualitative
26
L2 Students' Perceptions and Practices of both Giving and Receiving Online Peer-Feedback
results reported earlier, suggesting that students’ perceptions of the P2P process reported in the
survey constitute a valid representation of their practice. One thing that was new, though, was
their insistence on the use of affective language in their comments, even against the explicit
directions of the instructor, who repeatedly suggested that:
…
given how we all intend to be helping one another, there is no need to apologize for critical remarks,
etc., if it means you can get on sooner and more directly to solutions for the writing problems that you are
trying to help each other identify.
Regardless of such enjoining, though, students insisted on framing their critical comments
to one another with introductory forms of anxiety-mitigating small-talk about the weekend or
about the fact that they were glad to be taking the same class. They were consistent, also, in
their desire to compliment one another, reassuring their peers that their writing was “good” or
easy to read and “follow”, and that they had “learned” some nice vocabulary from each other
or been reminded about the requirements for the assignment and become, therefore, better able
to “understand” its purpose after reading their peer’s work.
When it came time to actually make critical comments about the forms and quality of each
other’s writing, students regularly took the time to express the hope that their comments would
be “helpful”, or would try to diminish the gravity of the mistake being described, noting that
this was just a “little weird point” or “just” the result of having written their assignments “in a
hurry.” At other times, students would apologize for not being able to explain their suggested
solutions with adequate clarity, or they would cast doubt on themselves and their comments by
making statements like, “this is just my suggestion, so don’t be upset” and “it is not [therefore]
necessary to care seriously”. In fact, this insistence on being careful with one another, even
against the instructor’s invitation not to, suggests that such affective or face-saving aspects of
the process should be seen as an integral part of the sort of feedback that students themselves
want and need in order to improve.
4) Intertextuality
The final theme identified in our analysis of students’ actual peer reviewing deals with
intertextuality. Rather than only and strictly commenting on their peer’s assignment, students
often recalled to their peers (a) what the instructor had said in class, or mentioned in feedback
to previous assignments, about writing in general or the criteria for success in a given
Richard Cassi dy․Daniel Bailey
27
assignment. At times, peer reviewers even rearticulated (b) what they had learned in other
classes and from other instructors, in one case, as far back as over two years ago. They passed
on (c) what other students had said about the commenter’s own assignment as it seemed
relevant also to the commentee’s work, and then publicly thanked their peers for the advice
they had been given. Finally, (d) commenters up- (or down-) voted and (dis)agreed with what
other students had said about a given piece of writing, such that the writer in question would be
given to feel more comfortable taking (or rejecting) the suggestions being offered.
In this way, the benefits attributed by students to the process of providing feedback have
increasingly not only to do with the potential local and global improvements made to a
particular assignment but also with the students’ feelings about the foreign language itself and
about themselves as users and learners of it. Indeed, the students’ peer reviewing practice
manifested such a large number and wide variety of such forms of intertextuality that the peer
review process itself begins to seem a very concrete example of the Zone of Proximal
Development which Vygotsky argued is where we are able to learn better together what we
have not yet (or could not learn) on our own (1978, pp. 84-91). For as students produce and
pass information back and forth to one another in the context of online social collaboration,
they appear to be constructing for themselves a “community of practice” of sorts (Wenger,
1998), or discursive space of their own as Virginia Woolf (1929) might have said: a collaborative
learning environment that is outside of class and independent of the instructor, and broader
and more enduring than any physical classroom could ever hope to be. Indeed, this online peer
review process begins to seem an environment suited like no other to the (re)transmission and
exchange, not only of information about and expertise in the foreign language itself, but of
(self) esteem also and of a whole range of metacognitive, social, and affective learning strategies
(Oxford, 1990) that will surely serve them long after this one set of writing assignments is long
ago graded and forgotten.
4. Summary of Results & Pedagogical Implications
The purpose of this paper was to use students’ own perceptions and practice of peer
reviewing to (re)examine the range of benefits that could be ascribed to the process as a whole,
and in a way that would bring further attention to bear on both the giving and the receiving
sides of the equation. Supporting previous studies that found students developing increasingly
positive perceptions over time (Choi, 2013; Hahn, 2016; Hanrahan & Isaacs, 2001; Joo & Kim,
28
L2 Students' Perceptions and Practices of both Giving and Receiving Online Peer-Feedback
2010; Moon, 2000; Moore & Teather, 2013), results from this study reveal that students found
the semester-long course of giving written feedback online to be at least as beneficial as their
receiving it, if not even more (or at least differently) so. Moreover, this study found the
students to be very consistent in their descriptions of the nature of useful feedback and
insistent about the improvements they felt they were making as a result.
Not only did we find them motivated by the opportunity to help one another improve their
assignments, but aware of and articulate about a range of higher level benefits available to them
as a result especially of their active involvement in the process, as Cho and Cho (2010) had
found also. Most striking of all, the online peer review process described above seems to
provide students with an occasion to increase their awareness and develop their use of the
kinds of metacognitive, social, and affective language learning strategies described by Oxford
(1990), and which have in turn been shown to improve both L2 performance and L2 writing
accuracy (Bailey, 2016). Indeed, asking students to believe in the possibility that they might be
able to help one another improve their written work seems to have acted as a Trojan horse of
sorts, making available to them a whole range of different language learning strategies. Indeed,
as Bailey, Lee, Vorst, & Crosthwaite (2017) or Bailey, Park, & Haji (2017) suggest in similar
contexts, the possibilities afforded by online learning environments are far reaching and very
much in need of further attention.
Specifically, this study found that students’ actual practice of peer reviewing confirms and
supports the perceptions documented by students’ survey responses. The conclusions drawn,
for example, on the basis of apparent continuities between areas of focus when writing and
commenting (Items 9-10) are supported by students’ focus on the same aspects of the L2 in
their comments on different peers’ work. We suggested, in this context, that even where
students are not producing new knowledge for themselves in the course of reading their peers’
work and providing helpful comments in response, and regardless moreover that their peers use
or not these comments correctly, peer reviewers are affording themselves an experience of
increasingly positive feelings about the foreign language, of themselves as helpful,
knowledgeable experts or, at the very least, as able to communicate in the L2 in ways that are
not only understood but may even sometimes be praised.
Again, such benefits are independent of whether the comments they provide are used or
used correctly. Thus, and beyond the important question of whether students of different
ability levels are able (or not) to use the peer feedback received to improve their own drafts (Liu
& Hansen, 2002; Joo & Kim, 2010), the results of this study show that the simple fact of having
to invest in the process of articulating and explaining their comments about their peers’ work
Richard Cassi dy․Daniel Bailey
29
can in and of itself be beneficial to language learning, as Cho & Cho (2010) also found.
It is in this context that all the extra time spent on the writing task takes on its greatest
significance, not only simply for the amount of extra writing practice it affords, but for the use
and awareness of social and affective language learning strategies it fosters (Oxford, 1990). It is
important, however, to note that all this extra writing practice is of a qualitatively different sort
than that required by writing assignments and exams, in the sense that it is (a) less formal
(circulating among peers), (b) more communicative (purpose-driven), and (c) graded for
content only (i.e. whether they are being specific and detailed) rather than for quality or
accuracy (or the number of mistakes being made in the process). Indeed, the motivating effect
of the communicative nature of this peer review activity cannot be emphasized enough.
5. Limitations & Directions for Further Study
A couple of important limitations need be noted here insofar as they point in the direction
of some much needed further research. The first is the inevitably very small data set of peer
comments analyzed in this study, and the lack also of space enough to look at whether the
expertise experienced and developed by students in the course of their peer reviewing
corresponds (or not) with, or contributes to actual improvements in their own writing, either
from first to final drafts of a single assignment, or over the course of a semester, from one
assignment to the next. The suggestion that an increase in focus on the benefits of students’
providing peer feedback (rather than only on what to do with the feedback received) leads to a
whole range of higher and lower level improvements and skills and performance, at least in the
long term, needs further testing.
Another major limitation of this study involves the lack of training provided to students
tasked with writing useful comments to one another (cf. also Hanrahan & Isaacs, 2001). While
that lack of peer review training afforded our study a kind of control against the undue
influence of the instructor’s beliefs on the students’ perceptions about the peer review process,
we did find that lower level students especially, who often described feeling unable even to find
mistakes in their peers’ work to comment on, were clearly in need of more, and more sustained
and detailed instruction about how to be helpful reviewers. Thus, and reiterating the call by Min
(2016) and others (Rollinson, 2005; Vickerman, 2009; Yang & Meng, 2013) for further research
into the training of students to engage in a peer review process, we note how important it
would be, in such a course of training, to show students how useful a simple paraphrase or
30
L2 Students' Perceptions and Practices of both Giving and Receiving Online Peer-Feedback
summary of their peer’s work can be, both, for the peer receiving it and for themselves. For if it
seems clear that the higher level benefits afforded by the task of providing useful feedback are
tied to the apparent gain in perspective that results, then surely some reflection on the value of
briefly summarizing what they have found in their peer’s work will constitute as integral an
aspect of our training them to do be more effective writers as reminding them (and ourselves)
to be careful with one another’s feelings about the writing (and thinking) we share.
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Richard Cassi dy․Daniel Bailey
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Items Pre
MSD
1. Was it more useful to make comments (1) or get comments from peers (2)? 5.26 0.44
2. The opportunity of getting comments on my work from my peers helped me
improve my writing assignments.
4.55 0.77
3. The opportunity of giving comments to my peers on their work helped me improve
my own writing assignments..
4.41 0.75
4. I usually made changes (redrafted) to the assignment I posted on Friday before
printing and handing it in on Tuesday.
4.95 1.16
5.I usually made changes (redrafted) to the assignment I posted on Friday before
printing and handing it in on Tuesday because of the comments I received.
4.56 1.05
6. I usually made changes to (redrafted) the assignment I posted on Friday before
printing and handing it in on Tuesday because of the comments I made on peers'
work.
3.79 1.05
7. The comments I received from my peers were just as helpful as those I got from
the instructor.
3.76 1.08
8. The comments I made on other people’s assignments help me when I write my own. 4.12 0.86
9. What do you focus on most when you make comments?
a. Content 4.22 1.19
b. Organization 4.29 1.49
c. Grammar 4.59 1.45
d. Vocabulary 3.37 1.21
e. Style 2.98 1.34
10. What do you focus on most when you write compositions?
a. Content 4.29 1.48
b. Organization 4.94 1.42
c. Grammar 4.20 1.25
d. Vocabulary 3.35 0.89
e. Style 2.90 1.30
Open Ended Items
11. What was the area where you improved the most, by receiving comments from other classmates?
12. What was the area where you improved the most, by making comments on others’ assignments?
13. What are the most useful kinds of comment you received from other classmates?
14. What are the most useful kinds of comment you received from the instructor?
APPENDIX A
In-House Developed Peer Review Survey
34
L2 Students' Perceptions and Practices of both Giving and Receiving Online Peer-Feedback
15. What kind of comments did you dislike getting?
16. What kind of comments did you dislike giving?
17. What did you learn from the process of READING your peer's work?
Applicable levels: tertiary and high school education
Authors: Cassidy, Richard (Seowon University, 1st author); chonggyol@gmail.com
Bailey, Daniel (Konkuk University Glocal Campus, corresponding author);
dbailey0566@gmail.com
Received: January 31, 2018
Reviewed: February 20, 2018
Accepted: March 15, 2018
