A Study Of Student Engagement With Peer Feedback In L2 Writing

Recent decades witness increasing studies on peer feedback and student engagement in L2 writing activities.Peer feedback,as an indispensable step for process writing,has proven itself useful for promoting students’ writing practice,and student engagement is regarded as a key factor for successful writing.While a few studies have investigated students’ engagement with peer feedback in L2 writing context,little research notices the reciprocal nature of peer feedback and fails to examine student engagement from both givers’ and receivers’ perspectives.Besides,relevant studies report that the one-shot design for investigating student engagement with feedback may not demystify the dynamic and changeable characteristics of student engagement.Therefore,this study attempts to explore how students affectively,behaviorally,cognitively engage with peer feedback activity and what factors might influence their engagement by advancing theoretical and pedagogical discussions on student engagement with peer feedback from both feedback givers’and receivers’ perspectives.It is hoped that this study will shed light on the complex,dynamic and changeable nature of student engagement with peer feedback.The study involves 31 Chinese English majors from a comprehensive university in Shandong Province.In order to achieve the research objectives,the study investigates student engagement with peer feedback activities in a 16-week-long academic English writing class,and conducts three rounds of data collection.The transcribed oral feedback conference,writing drafts in different phases,transcribed semi-structured interviews and stimulated recalls constitute the sources of data which are analyzed based on a qualitative approach.The findings of the study are as follows:firstly,students show various patterns of engagement with giving and receiving peer feedback.Affectively,students express their appreciation and positive attitude to both feedback-giving and-receiving practices,as well as their strong willingness to participate.However,disappointment occasionally appears during this process,which indicates the inconsistency among sub-dimensions of affective engagement.Cognitively,although it is difficult to maintain an intensive cognitive investment for a long time,students could also provide comprehensive and logical feedback by using a variety of cognitive and meta-cognitive strategies,and effectively receive feedback to improve their own essays.Behaviorally,students could efficiently provide and receive feedback with the help of e-dictionaries,journal articles,other students’ articles,and teachers’ guidance.It is worth noting that the participants in this study show agentic engagement with reciprocal peer feedback for the fact that they try to modify and regulate the whole reciprocal process,which suggests their substantive participation instead of procedural obedience.Secondly,the diverse patterns of students’ engagement with giving and receiving peer feedback reveals the complex and dynamic nature of engagement with reciprocal feedback.It’s shown that both feedback givers and receivers witnessed the interrelation among students’ behavior,cognition and affect.Furthermore,the dimensions of engagement with giving feedback may also interrelate to that of engagement with receiving feedback.It seems that these six dimensions tightly tangled and any slight change in some would probably cause a chain of variation in others.Thirdly,this study reveals a few influencing factors for student engagement with both giving and receiving peer feedback.The factors are self-efficacy,personality,motivation as internal factors,and partners’ writing proficiency,genre-based knowledge,peer discussion and teachers’ guidance as external factors.This study provides theoretical insights for researchers interested in student engagement with peer feedback and practical implications for L2 writing teachers and learners in peer feedback activities.It is suggested that teachers and students should pay equal attention to engagement with both giving and receiving peer feedback,and that feedback training,oral feedback conference and teachers’ guidance should be well implemented to facilitate student engagement.In the end,limitations of this study and suggestions for future research are presented.