Effect of peer feedback on paragraph writing performance among high school students

Abstract

Writing is one of the four important skills in learning a foreign language. However, most high school students find it uneasy to write due to many different both objective and subjective reasons. Finding effective solutions to this problem is always appreciated. This study, therefore, hopes to investigate whether peer feedback has any positive effect on this group’s writing performance. In order to support this investigation, the authors attempted to deploy a writing teaching strategy using peer feedback as the main instrument to foster students’ ability to write their paragraph. Two groups of the participants were recruited: 37 control students and 39 experimental ones in a high school in a rural district in Vietnam. After six weeks of intervention with this strategy, most students in the experimental group were awarded a better score than their counterparts in the control groups in general. The authors applied a 10 - scale rating rubric with three paragraph rating domains to measure their paragraph writing performance. Then, the authors also made an attempt to see the experimental students’ attitudes towards peer feedback after their application in class and they were satisfied with it afterwards. It revealed that overall they showed positive attitudes towards peer feedback.