JOURNAL REVIEW: Effects of Peer Feedback on EFL Student Writers at Different Levels of English Proficiency: A Japanese Context.

Kamimura, Taeko. (2006). Effects of Peer Feedback on EFL Student Writers at Different Levels of English Proficiency: A Japanese Context. TESL Canada Journal/Revue TESL du Canada Vol. 23, No. 2, Spring 2006 p12-34.

In this research, Kamimura investigates the effectiveness of peer feedback in Japanese writing classroom. First of all, views about the effects of peer feedback both in the context of English as L1 and L2 are mentioned. From the views, peer feedback gives positive effects on the students’ writing development, though some analysts do not agree with this. For the research, Kamimura took two classes of university students with different level of English proficiency. The text type used in the sessions is argumentative essay. Meanwhile, there are five sessions in this research, as the same treatment for both classes. The first session is pre-test where there is still no peer feedback. On the second session, students write the original draft of another essay with different topic. Then, the peer feedback training is held including three sessions. In the fourth session, as the previous one, students again work in pairs to rewrite the draft and start to give oral peer feedback to their partner. The last session is the post-test where they write another essay. In this case, students’ writing is scored holistically by word count, and classification of comments. According to the quantitative analysis on the data, both classes show the improvement on writing. In the qualitative analysis, Kamimura gives examples of the text both from the low and high-proficiency class. Overall, it can be concluded that peer feedback gives positive improvement of writing for the students with different levels of English proficiency, especially for the low one. Finally, Kamimura suggests some further studies to reach the conclusion about the peer feedback effects in EFL/ESL context.