View Content #24219

By Misaki Kato, CASLS Fellow

In writing classrooms, process writing (where the focus is on the process of planning, developing, and revising students’ drafts rather than just the final products) has become one of the major approaches that instructors employ to develop students’ critical thinking and writing skills (Graham & Sandmel, 2011). In such classrooms, peer review is an important opportunity for students to reflect on their own writing processes. While the goal of the peer review process is for students to help one another to improve their drafts, a critical barrier exists to utilizing this in classrooms; students seem to value and trust their instructor’s feedback much more than their peers’ (Nelson & Murphy, 1993). This is problematic because instructors have limited time and resources to give each student detailed feedback frequently throughout the course. So how can instructors convince students that peer review is useful to develop their own writing skills?

One way to convince students that peer review is worthwhile is to focus on the benefits of giving feedback rather than receiving it. The key is to shift the focus from encouraging students to revise their drafts based on their peers’ feedback to taking advantage of the reviewing process itself (e.g., Berg, 1999; Lundstorm & Baker, 2009). The ultimate goal is to develop skills to critically review/revise their own papers through practicing giving critical feedback to their peers’ papers. Below, I suggest simplified steps for effectively implementing peer review where the focus is on developing their self-evaluation skills.

(1) Discuss benefits of and concerns about peer review: Have students explicitly acknowledge any potential benefits and discuss concerns about peer review before encouraging them to do something they potentially have doubts about. After the discussion, introduce the idea that there are benefits for giving rather than receiving feedback. Explain that if students have experiences reading peers’ writing critically, they should be able to do the same for their own writing too (Lundstorm & Baker, 2009).

(2) Practice giving feedback: Have students review the same writing sample together and help one another come up with comments. Have students focus on just a few basic features (e.g., how easy to identify a thesis statement, whether the introduction paragraph has sufficient background information, and whether the sources are correctly cited) when doing peer review for the first time to keep the task manageable.

(3) Do peer review: Students (a) exchange drafts with a partner, (b) write comments, (c) exchange comments orally in class (before exchanging the written comments). In step (a), after students read the draft, they could summarize it out loud to make sure that the writer communicated the main argument clearly to the reader (if not, the reader could include which part was not clear in the written comments in the following step). In step (c), it is important that students discuss comments with the peer to clarify any written notes or points.

(4) Evaluate own papers: Students evaluate the same features in their own writing that they evaluated in their peers’ drafts. The focus of this activity is not so much about how to incorporate the peers’ feedback, but rather to have students analyze their own paper critically.

The effectiveness of this protocol is enhanced by repeating steps 2-4 throughout the course. Training students to be critical reviewers will have long-term benefits such as making them become more autonomous and independent writers who take their readers into consideration (Tsui & Ng, 2000) and take responsibility for their own writing. 

Note: This Topic of the Week was adapted from Kato (2015).

References:

Berg, E. C. (1999). The effects of trained peer response on ESL students' revision types and writing quality. Journal of second language writing, 8(3), 215-241.

Graham, S., & Sandmel, K. (2011). The process writing approach: A meta-analysis. The Journal of Educational Research, 104(6), 396-407.

Kato, M. (2015). Developing self-evaluation skills through giving peer writing feedback. ORTESOL Journal, 32, 70-72.

Lundstrom, K., & Baker, W. (2009). To give is better than to receive: The benefits of peer review to the reviewer's own writing. Journal of Second Language Writing, 18(1), 30-43.

Nelson, G. L., & Murphy, J. M. (1993). Peer response groups: Do L2 writers use peer comments in revising their drafts?. Tesol Quarterly, 27(1), 135-141.

Tsui, A., & Ng, M. (2000). Do secondary L2 writers benefit from peer comments?. Journal of Second Language Writing, 9(2), 147-170.