Students' Perceptions of Electronic Peer Feedback on Academic Writing

Jornada; V ELT Conference at UNVM: Innovations and Challenges in the 21st Century; 2019

The development of academic writing skills is an enriched social lifelong process as writers and audiences interact and shape their messages. Indeed, the teaching and learning relationship can benefit from the integration of technology that facilitates the interaction among participants. This paper focuses on a qualitative research project that seeks to understand the difficulties undergraduate students experience when they prepare and receive peer feedback, especially in an electronic format. The study involved feedbackcomments provided by students in a Technology course and students that received them in a Language course in a Teacher Training Program at a public university. Preliminary results showed that students enjoyed experimenting with various feedback formats, that is, giving and receiving feedback in the form of audios and marginal notes, because they differed from other formats they had used in previous courses. In addition, Technology students perceived they could express their ideas in novel ways, and Language students had the impression that they received more comprehensive feedback (Cabrera & Mayordomo, 2016). Students who provided feedback made connections between this project and their future teaching jobs, so they were highly driven throughout the process and eager to learn. Moreover, students who received feedback valued the experience in terms of the potential the feedback received has to help them improve their writing skills in general (Li, Liu, & Zhou, 2012). These preliminary results will help us refine the implementation of the feedback session this year, with the aim of improving and enhancing both our teaching practices and students? experience with peer feedback. In this paper, we will share how we implemented the project in both courses and the results we have obtained so far.