A Corpus-Based Study of Peer Comments and Self-Reflections: How Did ESL Learners Use Peer Comments in an Online Newswriting Project?

Introduction

Peer feedback and collaboration are supported by sociocultural theory of Vygotsky (1978) that students can have opportunities to scaffold each other’s learning. The practice of peer review has been widely adopted in the English as Second Language (ESL) writing classroom and studies over the recent decades. With the application of digital technologies, use of online peer review becomes popular in the writing classroom and is found to facilitate the drafting and editing process and is used as a part of the feedback process in addition to more traditional teacher comments. In their book on formative assessment, Boud and Falchikov (2007) suggested the ability to accurately judge one’s own work and the work of others is one of the fundamental competencies required in the workplace. It has therefore encouraged re-construction of feedback to make the assessment and evaluation process effective to meet the vocational needs. In a discussion of developing sustainable feedback practices, Carless, Salter, Yang and Lam (2011) further stated the importance of student self-regulation in fostering an active and constructive process of feedback. Incorporating peer and self-editing in the learning and teaching of writing therefore can be an option to create meaningful tasks and authentic assessment for learners to prepare for challenges in the workplace.

The present study examines the use of online peer review in ESL learners’ acquisition of journalistic writing skills at a university in Hong Kong. Through posting drafts and peer comments on a course weblog, the students practiced skills of desktop publishing simulating an authentic news-desk environment. In this paper, the discussion focuses on corpus analyses of student peer comments and self-reflections collected over a period of three consecutive semesters (September 2011 to December 2012). The researcher endeavors to investigate students’ adoption of peer comments in their drafting and revising of an online news article, using a quantitative approach based on keyword search and co-text of concordance findings. By examining the language features identified in the student corpora, the paper also aims to reveal the acquisition of online news genre and shed light on how peer review can be better implemented in the ESL writing classroom.