STUDENT ENGAGEMENT WITH PEER FEEDBACK IN EFL WRITING: A CASE STUDY AT AN ENGLISH CLASS FOR HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS

Abstract

This study was conducted with the intention of exploring how EFL learners engage with peer feedback in their revisions. To this end, the research seeks to answer two research questions: 1) What is the main focus of feedback generated by students on their peers’ writing?; 2) How do EFL students behaviorally engage with peer feedback when revising their texts? With the involvement of 12 EFL 11th-grade students from a high school in Hue, this qualitative study was conducted over an 8-week period. There were two data collection tools, each intended to address a particular research question. The first tool comprised 72 recordings of six weeks of peer feedback conferences. The second tool was made up of 144 writing texts (72 first and 72 revised drafts respectively). The findings indicated that students primarily provided evaluative feedback, followed by form-focused feedback, with content-focused feedback being the least frequently given. Furthermore, students’ behavioral engagement with the feedback was discovered. They generally corrected their errors although there were some instances where the received feedback was not addressed at all. Furthermore, students attended to the vast majority of direct form-focused feedback and had lower rates of implementation related to indirect form-focused and content-focused feedback.