| Peer feedback refers to a writing activity in which students exchange compositions with each other and put forward some suggestions for revision.It is regarded as an important developmental tool which enables writers to express themselves better through commenting on and revising multiple drafts.In cooperation with peers,students get assistance that pushes them to move from their actual developmental level to potential developmental level.Since 1980 s,many scholars have conducted research to explore the effectiveness of peer feedback,and they have come up with various and even different findings.Moreover,most of their studies evaluate the efficacy of peer feedback from a single perspective of either students’ overall improvement,implementation rate or revision type without adequate consideration on the relational or causal relations among these issues.Thus this study intends to explore the helpfulness of peer feedback by looking at the implementation of peer feedback and its influence on writers’ second draft revisions.Three research questions are put forward: 1)What’s the distribution of different types of peer feedback comments authors received? 2)How are different types of peer feedback comments implemented? 3)How is implementation of peer feedback comments correlated with revision improvement rate?45 students were carefully selected as the participants of the study.They were senior English major students from a university in northeast China.In this research,they were required to write a literature review of about 1000 words.After submitting their first draft,they reviewed four peers’ work through an online writing system called Peerceptiv.On receiving peer comments,they revised and submitted their second draft.Thus the dataset was composed of student first drafts,second drafts and peer feedback comments received from four peers.The analysis began with the segmentation of peer comments according to Nelson & Schunn’s(2009)coding scheme.720 pieces of feedback were coded into 1395 idea units.Then these ideas units were coded into Substance,High Prose and Low Prose according to Gao et al.’s(2018)classification.A total of 2511 codings were produced.The study used the software called Beyond Compare 4 to see how peer feedback comments were implemented in writers’ second draft.To explore the relationship between the implementation of peer feedback and revision improvement rate,correlation analysis and multiple regression were run.After a detailed analysis and discussion,the main findings of this study can be summarized as follows:(1)Writers got the most number of comments on Substance and the least comments on Low Prose among the three types,indicating that students were more concerned with content rather than language issues.However,in general,more comments were given to less challenging issues across all the three dimensions,suggesting that some issues were probably beyond the reviewers’ ability or were too demanding to the reviewers.Within Substance dimension,more comments were given to the relatively easy issue like Establishing Research Territory whereas the more challenging task like Occupying Research Niche received the least number of comments.This was also true with the linguistic dimensions of both High and Low Prose.Comments on Logical Cohesion within High Prose dimension had the largest number and comments on Clarity of Writing had the smallest number.Similarly,more comments were given to Mechanics within Low Prose dimension in contrast to fewer comments on Lexicon.In terms of grouping,asymmetric group received more comments than symmetric group.(2)Most peer feedback comments(63%)were implemented in writers’ second draft.Implementation of comments across the three dimensions appeared to be similar(all above 60%),with comments on Low Prose(69.8%)being implemented slightly more than the other two dimensions as Low Prose language issues were the easiest for writers to deal with.Within Substance,in consistency with the fewer amount of comments received,implementation rate of comments on Creating Research Niche was the lowest,proving that this is an issue challenging to both writers and reviewers.In High Prose dimension,Effectiveness of Argument comments were implemented the least(57.14%),demonstrating again that writers tended to implement more comments on relatively easy issues,things within their zone of development.Asymmetric group implemented a higher proportion of peer feedback comments than symmetric group.(3)Writers generally made an average improvement of 11.24% in their second draft after the peer feedback activity.And improvement rate showed significant though weak correlation with implementation of peer comments in general,especially with comments on Substance.Regression analysis showed that the combination of comments on Substance,High Prose and Low Prose significantly predicted students’ revision improvement rate,with the implementation of comments on Substance significantly contributing to the prediction.The above findings prove the effectiveness of peer feedback: students implemented a higher proportion of peer feedback,and these implemented comments,especially comments on Substance significantly improved students’ writing quality.This study implies that peer feedback can be used in Chinese EFL writing classes and comments on Substance should be encouraged in peer feedback activities involving complex writing tasks such as literature review.The current study,however,only focuses on the implementation of peer feedback,without exploring into the factors that influence students’ adoption.Future research can further analyze the influence of potential mediators on peer feedback implementation. |
