Effects Of Peer Feedback On Students’ EFL Writing Based On Persuasive Zone Of Competence Theory:a Case Study

Peer feedback,also known as peer review,peer response,has been advocated as an effective writing and learning activity in which students can exchange feedback to each other’s compositions and improve their writing quality through feedback uptake.However,it is often questioned whether students of different writing proficiencies can benefit from peer feedback,and there are not sufficient amount of studies exploring whether and to what extent students of different proficiencies can revise their writing through peer feedback activity.Guided by Schunn’s Persuasive Zone of Competence Theory,this study attempts to explore the following three research questions: 1)How did lower proficiency learners revise their writing through uptake of feedback from higher proficiency learners and what is the revision outcome? 2)How did higher proficiency learners revise their writing through uptake of feedback from lower proficiency learners and what is the revision outcome? 3)How did overlapping feedback from cross-proficiency peers contribute to the revision outcome?This study has adopted a qualitative research method supplemented by quantitative analysis,drawing on four students’ written drafts of eight weekly writing assignments,all the feedback they had received from their peers during the whole semester,five reflection journals,and four end of semester semi-structure interviews.The results show that 1)Two lower proficiency learners Kenny and Lucy have revised their writing through adopting the feedback received from higher proficiency peers.Lucy has made significant progress in the language skills dimension.Kenny has received significant amount of valuable feedback while he did not make effective revisions.2)Two higher proficiency learners Sandy and Zara have revised their writing after adopting peer feedback from lower proficiency learners.Sandy has shown significant progress in unity and coherence dimensions,and Zara in support dimension.3)Overlapping feedback from cross-proficiency peers has higher adoption rate and better revision effect.The study further evolves the two hypotheses of Persuasive Zone of Competence Theory: Firstly,students of varying competence in the same class are still in their Zone of Proximal Development,so they all can give effective feedback to their peers’ writing performance and revise their own writing performance through uptake of peer feedback.Secondly,overlapping feedback from cross-proficiency peers leads to a better revision outcome.The study also indicates that students’ revision outcome in peer review activity is also attributed to personal factors such as learning attitude.Implications for pedagogical facilitation of peer feedback literacy on writing were discussed.