Students’ perception of peer evaluation and teachers’ role in seminar discussions

Peer evaluation is considered as an alternative to teacher-based evaluation and its effects on writing assess-ments have been widely researched. This study aims at gauging students ’ perceptions of peer evaluation in a seminar discussion by a group of second-language university learners. With the imminent evolution in teach-ers ’ role in evaluation, this study also tries to explore teachers ’ role from the students ’ perspective in evalua-tion. The qualitative and quantitative responses suggest that although minimal evaluation training was offered to students, their evaluation and comments were considered fair, useful and sufficient by peers. Nevertheless, the students preferred teachers to peers to evaluate their performance in the discussion and they wanted to get more instructive comments from the teacher. The teacher’s possible roles in evaluation are presented at the end of the paper