From the findings, it can be seen that students highly rated the enjoyment of giving and receiving peer feedback during the peer work. With respect to giving peer feedback, students liked to give positive comments on their peers’ essays the most. This findings is consistent with what Lu (2016) found that students preferred providing positive feedback rather than negative ones to their peers. Another finding is that students enjoyed interacting with their peers during peer feedback sessions. This finding is absolutely supported by Nguyen Thi Thuy Loan (2018) that while correcting mutually among peers, students were interested in discussing with one another about vocabulary or grammatical structures on their peer’s paper and thus they found out that peer activities were enjoyable. More interestingly, this study also addressed the fact that students showed their preference on giving feedback to closer classmates rather than the others. As Saito (2013) reported, students’ feelings towards peer interaction much depended on who they interacted with. Hence, with those who were not considered closer classmates, students showed a shortage of enthusiasm and enjoyment. In terms of receiving feedback, students expressed their favor of getting positive feedback on their essays and felt proud when receiving such comments. Repeatedly, this finding is in line with what Lu (2016) found in his study. Although students sometimes did not appreciated feedback from peers, such correction gave them so much pride which motivated them to produce more qualifying work in future performance. Similarly with what has been discussed in giving feedback part, this study found out that students showed their interest in receiving feedback from closer peers, which is again consistent with that of Lu (2016). Finally, this study also pointed out that students favored this type of correction and looked forward to peer feedback sessions in their writing lessons. Especially, when they were well trained how to provide feedback, their trust among one another was thus set up as reported in Min (2005). Therefore, they knew the value of the peer’s comments and needed them to become academic
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writers. It is peer activities that students desired to be organized in future writing lessons.
The findings of the current study also indicated that over a half of the students approved that peer feedback is beneficial for students in their EFL writing learning process in different ways. The benefits are divided into four categories which are discussed below.
The first category of advantage that was identified in this study is students’
self-reflection promotion, which was agreed by most of teachers and students.
Referring to this, the current study found that peer response helped students to enhance the ability to identify their own strengths as well as weaknesses in their writing. This finding is consistent with that of Tsui and Ng (2000) which discovered that students would aware of their own mistakes thanks to reading his peer’s work.
Another benefit was that peer feedback help students generate better ideas. This finding concurs with that of Mendonỗa and Johnson (1994) which found out that when critically responding to their peer’s writing, students would be able to apply into their own product based on their peer’s comments. This finding is also vigorously supported by Khusnia’s (2015) that peer feedback engaged students in reflecting on their essays as well as identifying their own strengths and weaknesses.
It is undeniable that peer feedback benefited students in the way that they were able to relate their correction to their peers to their own to writing work. Hence, the more they gave corrections, the more self-reflection they obtained. Additionally, Ferris (2003) suggested that: “the weaker writers benefit from regularly reading the texts of more proficient writers, and the more advanced writers profit from the critical thinking required to give helpful feedback to their less able classmates” (p. 170).
When doing peer correction together, students get more diverse thoughts and ideas that probably help develop the content in their own paper.
Students’ confidence and motivation development was another strong point of peer feedback. This study found out that thanks to this type of correction, the
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majority of students showed their agreement on the fact that they were more confident, motivated and actively involved in learning to write. This findings was consistent with Ferris (1995) that they increase their confidence and believe in their writing because with peer feedback, they gain more writing practice than usual.
This finding was also under the light of Boud et al. (2009) that peer learning valued the mutual role in which how students taking responsibilities for their own learning and how these would be addressed. Moreover, the current study pointed out that students become more comfortable discussing and sharing ideas with their peers in their writing activities. This finding was aligning with Nguyen Thi Ha’s (2016) that in peer work students became more interested in exchanging drafts to each other and felt less stressed . In such work, they freely make conversation and questions if they were not contented with their peer’s correction. Theoretically, Ellis (2008) stressed that peer feedback work provided students a preference to enhance the ability to take part in the assignment. It is undoubtedly that in terms of confidence and motivation, students got certain benefits.
Furthermore, another importance of peer feedback in learning writing was emphasized in this study. It was students’ writing competence improvement throughout the implementation of peer feedback. Regarding to this, this study indicated that peer feedback helped students improve the ability to use more accurate vocabulary and collocation in their writing paper. This finding was consistent with that of Diab (2011) who pointed out that peers give more useful comments on word choice in their peers work when they do peer feedback seriously. Besides, regarding to grammar which is one of the most important factors determining writing skills, the current study found that peer feedback helped reduce grammar mistakes in students’ paper. This finding is strongly supported by that of Nguyen Thi Thuy Loan (2018) that by reading and looking for what needed improving in their peers’ writing, students noticed grammar mistakes and give corrections on them. Last but not least, one of the most outstanding finding of this study is that peer feedback helped develop content in students’ writing. This is in
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accordance with Kamimura’s (2006) that when working with peers, students got back various perspectives from diverse readers, which enabled them to enhance the content in their work. Indeed, thanks to peer comments, students were able to modify more ideas for their drafts that could be useful in their writing. With argumentative assay, their work became more convincing. Gradually, their writing skills would be accumulated in a positive way.
The last benefit addressed in the findings of this study is students’
improvement of skills in providing feedback. With respect to this, this study highlighted that after peer feedback activities, students could identify strengths as well as mistakes in their peer writing easily. This finding is in the light of Nguyen Thi Ha’s (2016) which found that feedback peer feedback checklist, students became more professional in determining errors in writing. Especially, with the clarification about feedback checklists, the activities became easier for peer correction. Hence, students could know how to provide constructive comments to the others. This was also accordance with that of Min (2006) that when doing peer feedback, students know how to give constructive feedback on writing elements they had to evaluate on their peers. When working with well- designed feedback checklists providing criteria clearly, students could refer them to give feedback correctly. Therefore, the more they did peer comments, the more chances they had to provide feedback to others. By this way, students naturally became experts in error correction. Thus, that’s why students could improve their skills of giving comments.
Despite being considered an effective tool in teaching writing, peer feedback is perceived to have negative effect that must be carefully considered. The findings in this study revealed that the majority of students and teachers thought that peer feedback was a time-consuming process. This finding was consistent with what was found in Nguyen Thi Thuy Loan’s (2018). This is because when being involved in such activity, it took time for reading and making notes, even discussing with peers
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to meet an agreement on the mistakes. It is undeniable that it consumed a large amount of time from the beginning to the end of the process. Moreover, the finding also found out that peer feedback was believed to be less reliable than teacher’s.
The majority of students agreed that their peers’ comments were not as high-quality as their teacher’. This finding was a support for Mangelsdorf’s (1992) which addressed that peer comments could not be trusted. Although feedback was from the provider whose level of English proficiency was high, it could hardly be the final version of correction (Gielen et al., 2010) However, the findings of this study showed that students were unsure if negative feedback made their peers lose face and broke their friendship or not. These are on contrary with those in Dochy, Segers, and Sluijsmans’s (1999) which affirmed that receiving negative feedback could lead to the fact that their peers felt bored and shy. It means that the participants in this study neither agree nor disagree with these results. They might think that peer feedback was an informative activity, so they did not care much about whether or not their comments hurt their peers.
With respect to what have been discussed so far, it can be concluded that peer feedback has been conducted in writing classes at BLU. Both benefits and drawbacks of this type of correction were emphasized at the same time. The former definitely outweighs the latter. Indeed, it is delighting that not only students but also teachers perceived that peer feedback brought many benefits for students in learning writing and helped improve writing skills afterwards. However, the implementation of this teaching approach is still in doubt due to teachers’ failure of peer feedback preparation and organization. The effectiveness of peer feedback much depends on how teachers employed it in their writing lessons to suit students’ level of English proficiency. Hence, to stimulate students’ engagement and concentration and boosting the efficacy of peer correction, careful consideration of teachers to the application of peer feedback in writing classes is a must.
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