The Interaction and Impact on Revision of Peer and Teacher Feedback in an Esl Classroom

The purpose of this study is to describe the impact of peer group and teacher response on student revision. Recent empirical studies have focused on the impact of peer input on revision, but while they have divided their attention between oral revisions and written revisions, no published study has been made on the effect and interaction of both written and oral input on student revision. My paper, a case study of a freshman ESL writing class, seeks to fill this gap. Six students in a freshman ESL writing class took part in the study. Over an eight week period, the students produced and responded to three drafts of two essays. Peer response took two forms: first, the students were given copies of each others\u27 essays and asked to provide written response to them; next, the students brought these drafts to peer group sessions where their written comments provided the foundation for oral discussion. Teacher response was also supplied. All drafts were collected; written comments and revisions were scored. Any correlation between peer comments, teacher comments, and revisions from the student writer was noted. With these data, I came to the following conclusions: first, revisions which occurred in written and oral forms were more likely to adopted by the writer than those occuring in one form only. Second, students adopted a much higher percentage of teacher revisions than peer revisions. Third, peer comments were given much more attention when separated from teacher comments. The findings of this study support the need to combine written and oral peer response during peer review workshops and to separate student response from teacher response