Exploring EFL Students’ Engagement In Peer Writing Feedback Through Rebuttal Tasks At Junior High School

According to the English Curriculum Standards for Compulsory Education(Ministry of Education,2022),English educators must consider students’ subjectivity in elementary and secondary school English courses.(Ministry of Education,2022).Therefore,peer feedback,as a tool to highlight students’ subjectivity,has received more and more attention from foreign language teachers and researchers.However,research shows that students’ commitment to peer feedback activities has not yet met educator expectations.Without adequate student engagement,the effectiveness of peer feedback activities can be significantly diminished.The existing research only focuses on the student’s engagement in feedback and fails to explore a teaching design scheme that can effectively improve the student’s engagement,thereby improving the effectiveness of peer feedback activities.Based on this,this study explores the engagement of 60 students in the second grade from three dimensions of cognition,behaviour and emotion,using the framework of student engagement theory and the theoretical framework of student engagement influence factors.In addition,this study further explores the relationship between the rebuttal task and student engagement by introducing the rebuttal task.1.How do rebuttal tasks affect EFL students’ engagement in peer feedback with a rebuttal task? 2.What factors contribute to EFL students’ engagement in peer feedback with a rebuttal task?Data collection includes questionnaires,teacher observation logs,student reflection logs,and semi-structured interviews.The results show that first,the rebuttal task plays a role in improving the engagement status of students in peer feedback.The rebuttal task effectively enhances the students’ cognitive engagement,reflected in the shallow strategy,deep strategy and the metacognition process.The influence of rebuttal tasks on students’ emotional engagement is manifested in three aspects: recognition of the usefulness of the task,the pleasure of the task,and affection for the task.The student’s behavioural commitment is also influenced by the rebuttal task,as demonstrated by the student’s time spent on the task,the number of outside resources sought,and the three dimensions of effective recommendation adoption.Secondly,contextual and individualized factors influence students’ engagement in responding to tasks.Contextual factors include task reward and punishment mechanism,seating arrangement and interpersonal relationship(e.g.,teacher role and peer familiarity).Individual factors include language skills(such as native and second language)and learning beliefs.By exploring the influence of the rebuttal task on the engagement of foreign language students,this study enriches the relationship between the rebuttal task and student engagement in peer feedback,expands the cognition of the influence factor of the rebuttal task on engagement theory,and also provides an effective teaching design scheme for junior English teachers to improve the engagement of students in peer feedback...