The Role of Peer Feedback in Improving EFL Writing Skills of Saudi English Major Students - Essay Example

The Role of Peer Feedback in Improving EFL Writing Skills of Saudi English Major Introduction: Writing beautifully is an art that everyindividual may need to master in order to succeed in life. A good piece of writing is one that conveys the intended meaning and information in a clear, appropriate, and accurate manner. However, acquiring this ability is considerably challenging in a second language context, when an individual is required to communicate comprehensively in a language other than his mother tongue. Therefore, searching for ways to help students improve their second language writing skills is an important objective of educational researchers and teachers. One of the most common modes of assistance given to students to help them develop their writing skills is ‘feedback’. The major goal of the provision of feedback is to aid students in improving their writing proficiency to reach the point where they have the ability to write well, with maximum clarity and minimal errors. Teacher feedback is a traditional type of feedback that has dominated EFL (English as a Foreign Language) writing classes for a long time. Saudi Arabian educational context is not an exception. Teachers most often mark every single error in the written work and then assign it a grade. Some students may think that their teachers’ feedback is biased and take it personally. However, recently with the improvement of research and pedagogy on writing, feedback practices have been changed. Peer feedback is currently getting considerable attention as a way to teach writing. This essay discusses the role of peer feedback as a solution to improve the English Language writing skills of Saudi students, whose native language is not English. It could help transform English writing abilities of these students, marking a shift from the traditional approaches of teaching EFL writing, which are still dominant in universities. This essay will firstly look at general issues connected with the topic, discussing the significant role of feedback in improving L2 (second language) writing. It will then briefly introduce the dominant teaching approaches to L2 writing which include the product approach, the process approach and the genre approach. The essay will also shed some light on feedback techniques related to each approach. Following this, a section of the essay will discuss the difficulties faced by Saudi students at university and college level who have chosen English language as a major. The essay will explain the role of peer feedback in helping them improve their EFL writing competencies. Following this, a section of the paper will present the concept of peer feedback in detail. Finally, the last section will look at the issue of collaborative learning, in order to provide a theoretical basis for the process of peer feedback to help better understand this type of approach. 2. The Importance of Feedback Many researchers have found a positive relation between students’ writing achievements and the provision of feedback. It is seen that feedback improves writing skills since it gives both students and teachers a picture of students progress and improvement. It is also considered to be “a key element of the scaffolding provided by the teacher to build learner confidence and the literacy resources to participate in target communities” (Hyland and Hyland, 2006: 83). This implies that students develop better confidence in their abilities as they build on the supporting learning structures that result from teacher feedback. Hyland and Hyland (2001) suggested that feedback is useful for not only beginners but also expert writers since feedback makes them reflect on and evaluate their written work. It also helps them notice areas of weaknesses in their work. Feedback also helps students stay informed about their current level of performance, and guides them in improving it further to reach a satisfactory level. Feedback could serve as a tool that teachers and also students use to aid in comparing their performance with a better version and to identify their strengths and weaknesses. It points out problems and provides students with suggestions to consider for improving their writing. Feedback also enhances students’ writing abilities by creating the motivation to write something better in the next draft as thoughtful comments motivate students to revise their works. Without receiving appropriate feedback, students would only revise their works in a piecemeal way. The revision will be non-focused without comments from readers and so students would assume that their work has fully and clearly communicated the intended meaning. They would therefore be under the false assumption that there is no need to revise their text. Moreover, students may get confused as they would be left unaware of the parts that need to be improved, thereby leaving their efforts misdirected and unproductive (Ashwell, 2000; Hyland & Hyland, 2001; Ferris, 2002; Hyland, 2003). 3. Writing Approaches 3.1. The Product Approach: The product approach focuses on grammatical characteristics of a written text. Badger & White (2000) and Hyland (2003) considered the writing process in this approach as a product. As per the approach, writers produce and control their writing on the basis of their linguistic knowledge. This approach emphasises that the final outcome of writing and language proficiency are the most important parts of the writing process (Sommers, 1982). The product approach as Badger and White (2000) stated places high priority on the written text and on the writer’s linguistic knowledge. It also mainly considers the improvement of students’ writing as a result of the teachers input. Writing is presented through models and students are encouraged to imitate the given models (Ferris and Hedgcock, 2005). Writing is taught through four stages, namely – familiarization, controlled writing, guided writing and free writing. The product approach has some advantages. It is easy to apply in large classes since the primary emphasis is on formal text units. Marking students’ compositions is also easy because teachers, while correcting the works, tend to focus their attention on the form of writing. The product approach can be effective in classes that lay emphasis on writing structure. It might be more beneficial for lower level students because this approach helps them correct their errors with ease. The product approach has been widely used and teachers are quite familiar with it (Tribble, 1996). However, this approach has a number of limitations. Ferris and Hedgcock (2005) contend that the product approach is not concerned with cognitive processes of writing and strategies of learning. In other words, it pays attention to the writing structure and vocabulary as the primary indicators of writing improvement, ignoring the writing processes such as pre-writing, drafting, revising and editing, that students go through while writing. In addition, as Hyland (2003) stated, this approach may lead to problems since it restricts writing pedagogy to syntactic and grammatical accuracy, and that can limit students’ understanding of the nature of good writing as well as restricting students’ creativity by relying on imitation. The emphasis on grammatical structure has not proved to be effective in promoting writing skills as many researchers debate the helpfulness of focusing only on grammar (Truscott, 1996). Ellis (1994) explains that the improvement of form in such writing is done by providing feedback on error correction. In the product approach, feedback can be provided either as written form or as oral comments. Corrective feedback can be given by either directly showing the correct form wherever students make an error or indirectly giving students directions to improve the incorrect forms by underlining or circling appropriate text and leaving it to students to correct their errors. Alternatively, codes are used to highlight grammatical or structural errors. For instance, ‘T’ is used to indicate a tense error or ‘WO’ is used to indicate a word order error. 3.2. The Process Approach: The process approach emerged as a reaction to product approach pedagogies. As the research field on writing ability shifted from the focus on teaching grammar, grammatical error correction and the mechanisms of writing, to the cognitive processes of writing, it became an important concern for L2 teaching. The process approach considers the development of writing as a result of unconscious processes such as providing exercises to improve writing skills, and views the process of writing as a way of practicing language skills (Badger and White, 2000). The process approach guides students to the final stage of finishing a written text and goes beyond just applying linguistic knowledge. It focuses on linguistic skills and includes identifiable stages, namely – pre-writing, planning, drafting and revising (Goldstein and Carr, 1996). Hyland (2003) indicated that in the process approach, the role of the teacher is not only to pay attention to grammatical structure but also to help students improve their writing-associated cognitive processes by using a number of techniques such as planning, brainstorming, drafting, peer collaboration, portfolio assessment and delayed editing. Hyland (2003) went on and explained that there are a number of ways to provide feedback in the process approach. These include one-to-one conferencing, peer feedback, audiotaped feedback and reformulation. Freeman and Freeman (2004) discussed a number of advantages of the process approach. The first benefit is that this approach motivates students to express their own opinions and explore their creativity. Secondly, it involves the participation of both teachers and students in peer feedback, discussions, and teacher-student conferencing. In this context, the writing process naturally moves towards the application of a set of cognitive processes rather than on mere demonstration of linguistic knowledge. However, the process approach has some weaknesses. First, it is considered to be time-consuming, particularly with large classes and also because it needs a great amount of time for marking the written works. It may also be difficult to schedule teacher-student conferences because of limited time. The process approach might discourage those who are not used to reworking on their written texts as they may consider the need for revision as a kind of failure (Corpuz, 2011). 3.3. The Genre Approach: According to Badger and White (2000), the genre approach emerged as an extended type of the product approach. These approaches share the same view as they emphasise the importance of linguistic knowledge to the writing process. The genre approach however differs from the product approach as the former considers that the writing process has many aspects that need to be dealt with. That is to say, the purpose of writing, the subject matter, and the nature of the relation between the writer and the reader is considered to be the main elements in the genre approach. Writing in the genre approach, as Flowerdew (1993) mentioned, is categorized into different types of text, such as articles, reports, and research proposals as students are taught the kind of writing required for each of these written texts depending on a particular target task. The genre approach has various advantages. As Kim (2007) points out, the genre approach has high acceptance among students because it uses examples to show them what they need to do. The approach, by reflecting on its social purpose, helps students understand the intricacies involved with a particular style of communication. It also helps students acknowledge the strong association between functional features and form of writing, along with giving them an understanding of the rhetorical organization of specific text types. On the other hand, the genre approach also has several disadvantages. It tends to underestimate vital writing skills and also assumes that learners do not have sufficient knowledge to complete their writing (Byram, 2004). This approach also tends to overestimate the importance of text features and conventions in content. In the genre-approach, feedback is not much different than that of the product or the process approach except for the fact that it lays more emphasis on conventions associated with this approach. The feedback provided to students focuses on two key elements, namely community-associated conventions and knowledge, and they are asked to pay attention to these elements in their written text. The teacher feedback given in this approach thus depends on presentation, content, organization and structure of writing. It is however not necessary to cover each of these aspects in every draft the student prepares. Broader attention can be given to these aspects through group discussions and all students could thus benefit because their writing is based on the same requirements, text features and terminology (Hyland, 2004). Feez (1998) offered an example of peer feedback in the genre based approach wherein students are given a specially designed checklist to evaluate other students’ works. The checklist contains a set of criteria that are used to assess whether or not the student has fulfilled the requirements for various aspects of the writing task. This checklist, for instance, could assess whether various elements have been covered in the text. These could include the staging and purpose, clause grammar (such as prepositions, verbs, nouns, etc.), text unity (such as conjunction, lexical sets and references) and other such elements. 4. Teaching EFL Writing to Saudi Students with English Language Major: In Saudi English language Major, written assignments are an essential requirement in most Saudi universities. These written assignments include research reports, formal letters, and translations of Arabic text. As English is not the native language, many Saudi university and college students consider writing as the most challenging skill among the other language components (reading, speaking and listening). The IELTS test performance of 2008 for Saudi students, for example, revealed that the scores of writing component of Saudi students were the lowest average mark (4.83 out of 9) compared to other language skills (4.97, 5.81, and 5.17 in speaking, reading and listening respectively). Their background is six years of formal English language education as a compulsory requirement in school, where competence to write simple English text is an important educational objective, which in the case of most students is not substantially achieved. In the Saudi culture, teachers are greatly valued and have a high level of influence. Students see teachers as the sole authority and therefore are over-reliant on teachers as their prime source of knowledge. The teachers are mostly native Saudis and could sometimes be from other Arabic countries. They often need more training to be qualified as English language teachers. Teaching of writing skills in most Saudi schools follows the product approach wherein teachers present a few model texts for their students to imitate, and the teacher’s main emphasis is on the final product that their students produce. In other words, much instruction is given about producing written texts, rather than actually promoting beneficial and cognitive writing skills. In such a pedagogical context, feedback is typically considered to be at a lower level, as it mainly focuses on grammar, vocabulary, and mechanics such as spelling, capitalization, and punctuation. Although the EFL writing pedagogy at university and college level is influenced by the recent trends in second language learning research, the practice has not changed much. Accordingly, the writing pedagogy is more focused on the written product. Writing has almost always been presented as an evaluative practice, subsequently contributing to most students’ apprehension with regard to writing. This has been further promoted by the fact that feedback on students written texts is basically evaluative in nature and is teacher-based. There are some practices that can be related to ‘process writing’ techniques, where students are encouraged to plan their writing by discussing and sometimes brainstorming given topics either in their first language or in the second language. However, students are most often left to themselves to plan or not to plan. Moreover, students are commonly not required to write more than one draft, and are then made to go through revisions. Accordingly, any revision practice from the student himself is a self-revision. It could be said that teachers mostly rely on the students’ tendency to automatically acquire useful writing strategies which happen unintentionally upon their completion of a set of writing tasks. In addition, students do not normally receive follow-up work after their written assignments have been marked. As a consequence, a number of problems in writing have been found in terms of both quality and quantity, besides some issues related to students’ writing attitudes. For example, students lack ‘critical thinking’ ability, which is considered to be an important skill in order to be a good writer. Additionally, students lack originality in their ideas during writing, which could be attributed to be a result of lack of effective feedback, since most often their works are marked without feedback. This puts them in a situation where they think it is not worth to take the risk of presenting new ideas because imitating others for the same could help them pass easily. The emphasis of marking the written texts throughout is on the use of correct forms and on grammatical and mechanical errors, rather than on content, comprehensiveness, and organization. This increases the feelings of apprehension of students when they are asked to submit the required assignments in written form or even when they are required to undertake any writing task. Moreover, examinations of most subjects make it mandatory for students to write long essays, which is considered to be another challenging task that adds to the responsibility of the teachers who, in turn, put more pressure on their students to provide structurally and grammatically correct writing compositions. In this context, “the teacher is engaged in a form of testing rather than teaching" (Harris, 1975:305). In such a pressurizing atmosphere, students work individually in their writing assignments with the lack of cooperative discussion from teachers and peers. This practice of teaching makes writing a solitary work and students are left with no support and the feeling of alienation. This feeling is strengthened by the students attitudes towards the feedbacks they receive from their teachers on their written products as they are afraid of receiving negative criticism from their teachers, something that makes them feel ashamed. Because of the fear of being reprimanded for structural, grammatical and mechanical errors in their writing, and also because of the feelings of shame associated with it, students may be repulsive towards feedback from teachers. In addition, especially in the case of EFL students in Saudi, students may find it difficult to converse in English with their teachers as they may not be very fluent in it. This makes the process of teacher feedback less effective. On the other hand, they will find it easy to communicate with their peers and may even take constructive criticism of their written works lightly without feeling ashamed or without the fear of being reprimanded. Peer feedback could therefore be helpful for Saudi students in improving their writing skills. Peer feedback could serve as a complementary part of other solutions as it helps reduce anxiety and increase self-confidence. Many researchers (e.g. Villamil and de Guerrero, 1996; Mendonça and Johnson, 1994) encourage the application of peer feedback in writing pedagogy since it is proved that it releases anxiety in learning and therefore could help students in improving their writing effectively. It also increases the students’ motivation by instilling a passing sense of joint-responsibility (Topping, 2000). Peer feedback provides students with a chance to see the commonality of his/her difficulties and realize that his/her problems are not unique. As a result, students are empowered to improve themselves and to not feel ashamed when giving or getting feedback for each other’s writings. They will also not feel threatened by being accused of not being good writers (Grabe and Kaplan, 1996). One of the advantages of peer feedback is that the interaction between students differs from the interactions between them and their teachers. This atmosphere can create a good environment for improving critical thinking skills. This also replaces passive learning where students do not rely merely on teacher as a resource for learning and move on to active problem-solving through cooperative learning (Nystrand & Gamoran, 1991). Peer feedback establishes a collaborative dialogue for two-way feedback. Effective peer feedback covers several functions such as making suggestions, giving additional information, asking questions, encouraging, discussing and responding to many aspects of their peers’ writings (Rollinson, 2005). In addition peer feedback makes it possible for students to complete their work ahead of the submission date, leaving them enough time for revising, editing, and improving their writing before turning it in Peer feedback not only has a positive effect on students, but can also help save teachers’ time by alleviating the need to perform certain editing tasks and to rather use this time for more important instructions and guidance (Rieber, 2006). 5. General Overview on Peer Feedback Peer feedback is one of the various feedback approaches that are found to be effective in improving the writing abilities in ESL and EFL classrooms. Liu and Hansen defined peer feedback as: Use of learners as sources of information and interactants for each other in such a way that learners assume roles and responsibilities normally taken on by a formally trained teacher, tutor, or editor in commenting on and critiquing each other’s drafts in both written and oral formats in the process of writing. (2002: 1) Peer feedback has various forms and can serve many purposes. Peer feedback can be in the form of written conversation, in the form of conferencing, and oral comments, or a combination of all these forms. Moreover, peer feedback can take different formats. For example, teachers can divide students in groups of 2-4 and ask them to exchange their first drafts and then provide comments on their drafts before writing the final versions. Another approach to the peer feedback would be to ask students to read their written texts out loud, or the teacher could instead ask another student to read it for him/her while the rest of the class listens and gives feedback on their peer’s written work which they have just heard. It could be used as the pre-writing stage. Teachers could also ask students to give comments on each other’s outlines or can also use peer feedback as a brainstorming class (Hyland, 2003). Teachers can carry out peer feedback on content, structure or style. In content feedback, the focus is on the relevance of the information of the written text to a said topic, as well as the clarity of the argument and explanation of concepts. Feedback on structure of the written text is concerned with the inner consistency of the written texts. Style feedback looks at the outer form of the written work, which includes the layout, language, grammar, and spelling as main concerns (Van Den Berg, Admiraal & Pilot, 2006). There are three approaches to peer feedback as identified by Rieber (2006). These include open-ended, guided and directed peer review. These approaches are actually dependent on the teachers’ instructions. In an open-ended peer feedback, teachers do not provide instructions on the process of feedback as students are considered to be experts. Therefore, this kind of peer feedback is used in advanced classes as students have the knowledge and confidence to provide a peer review for each other’s work without additional inputs from the teacher. The teachers in guided peer feedback provide a list of general questions to the students to check as they review each other’s papers. Directed peer feedback can be used in lower classes where students lack good writing skills. Teachers give students a checklist that contains all the assignment guidelines and aspects that need to be tallied with their peers’ written texts. In order to provide a successful peer feedback in the class, teachers should consider some procedures to apply in the class. For instance, teachers need to make sure that their classroom has a comfortable atmosphere and the role of students in the peer feedback process should be clear. They should also be introduced to revision guidelines and strategies. Students need to acknowledge the effectiveness of peer review in academic writing not only for beginner writers but also for successful professional writers as they most likely benefit from other writer’s comments. Students also should give much focus on rhetoric feedback more than sentence-level errors. Students should be careful with their language when providing their opinions as some expressions need to be avoided. For example, rather than saying, “your writing is bad”, they could alternatively say, “you need to provide more clarification here” (Berg, 1999). Peer feedback is considered to be a social activity (Bijami, Kashef and Nejad 2013). Although some researchers prefer teacher feedback over peer feedback, an ample amount of research has shown that in the case of writing classes, peer feedback is helpful because it has social and cognitive benefits. Peer feedback helps students improve their knowledge by providing them with opportunities for critical thinking and by improving their autonomy (Bijami, Kashef and Nejad 2013). 6. Collaborative Learning Peer feedback is viewed as a collaborative activity. Collaborative learning is considered to be an important aspect in the field of language education. McWham et al. (2003) stated that university and college students have increasingly been instructed to work cooperatively. According to Nunan (1992) and McWham et al (2003), there are several reasons for applying collaborative learning in language education. These reasons, at an advanced learning level, include the diversity of the student population where students need to develop their attitudes towards group learning, the increased focus on peer learning and other learner-driven approaches, and also because of the high number of student projects that require team effort. In addition, teachers may want to experiment different strategies on organizing teaching and learning. Teachers may want to promote a cooperation philosophy among students rather than competition. Moreover, curriculum designers may find group learning a way in which they can incorporate leaner-centeredness principles in their programmes. McWham et al. (2003) mentioned that studies have revealed that collaborative learning has academic and cognitive benefits as group learning aids to promote learning and achievement, as well as in developing the critical thinking skills which help in the improvement of social skills such as leadership, communication, problem-solving, presentation, organization, and delegation. Kohonen (1992) argued that collaborative learning emerged due to the recent developments in second language learning field where the emphasis shifted from behaviorist models (which view teaching as a medium of transition knowledge) to experiential models (where teaching is viewed by constructivists as transformation of existing understood knowledge). Collaborative learning has many goals which involve establishing ‘positive interdependence’ between the members of the group as students work cooperatively for mutual benefits, also creating a sense of responsibility among students where students care about the success of the whole group as their own, and creating a feeling of social support. These objectives all together aid students in developing higher self-confidence and self-esteem besides academic achievement (Kohonen, 1992 and Nunan, 1992). 7. Conclusion: Peer feedback as it was presented in this essay can be a very beneficial collaborative activity in EFL writing sessions. Unfortunately, this kind of feedback is novel in many non-Western teaching contexts such as Saudi Arabia where teacher-feedback based classes are still dominant. The education system in Saudi Arabia is in the traditional style where it is loaded by rules, and is bound by a certain structure. Saudi students are taught writing by structured written exercises and traditional drills. Students’ writing is most often controlled and guided with model writings provided by teachers rather than allowing them to write freely. However, this situation could be changed with proper awareness of the educational problems and with appropriate writing instructions such as applying cooperative learning and peer feedback to make students better writers. References Ashwell, T. (2000), “Patterns of Teacher Response to Student Writing in a Multiple-Draft Composition Classroom: Is Content Feedback Followed by Form Feedback the Best Method?”, Journal of Second Language Writing, 9(3), pp 227 – 257. 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