Assessing The Impact Of Peer Revision On English Writing Of Secondary L2 Learners

The study seeks to assess the impact of peer revision and teacher comments on L2 writers' final drafts in narrative writing among 24 secondary L2 learners. More specifically, the study aims to answer the following three questions:1) Do secondary L2 writers benefit from peer revision?2) How are peer revisions and teacher comments incorporated by writers in their final versions?3) How are trouble sources revised in peer sessions according to different language aspects: content, organization, vocabulary, grammar and mechanics?This research is based on an experimental study on peer revision and teacher comments, a questionnaire and some interviews. First, in a writing course, the researcher divided the 24 students into 8 groups and chose two compositions from each group for peer revision and teacher comments after three writing tasks. Then the first drafts, the second drafts and the final drafts of the 16 compositions were compared and analyzed to answer the three questions. Second, after the course, a questionnaire survey was administrated to all the 24 students. Finally, interviews were conducted on the 16 student writers by the researcher. Both quantitative and qualitative data were obtained and analyzed. The findings show that secondary L2 learners, despite the fact that they are less mature L2 writers compared to tertiary L2 learners, have important roles to play in providing feedback to their peers' writings. Although L2 learners favor and incorporate more teacher comments than peer comments in the revisions of their writing, the former does not substitute for the latter. Teacher comments tend to induce more revisions to the macro-structures of a text whereas peer comments have the specific roles of enhancing a sense of "real " audience in the students, raising the students' awareness of strengths and weaknesses of their own writings, encouraging collaborative learning and fostering an ownership of text. In the study of peer revision, it is proved that half of peer revisions are incorporated in their writings and students focus especially on grammar whereas organization is the least attended to. Meanwhile, student writers make many further revisions and self-revisions in their writings on the basis of previous peer revision, suggesting a pattern of behavior conducive to self-regulation. Moreover, most second drafts increase in length, which demonstrates that the peer interactions have an effect on rethinking and restructuring the original text. Finally, 16 per cent of false repairs are found overall among the peer revisions.It is the author's belief that the roles played by the teacher and the peers are complementary and it will be quite necessary to study how to combine peer revision with teacher feedback scientifically in writing teaching.