The Effect of the Combination of Peer and Self-directed Feedback on Writing Ability of Students across English Proficiency Levels

ABSTRAK Amelia, Rizky. 2016. The Effect of the Combination of Peer and Self-directed Feedback on Writing Ability of Students across English Proficiency Levels. Thesis, English Language Teaching, Graduate Program, State University of Malang. Advisors: (I) Prof. Mohammad Adnan Latief, M.A., Ph.D., (II) Dr. Enny Irawati, M.Pd. Keywords: peer and self-directed feedback, writing ability, English proficiency The gaps in feedback implementation bring this study to report the use of the combination of peer and self-directed feedback on students’ writing ability. As the results of the previous studies on the subjects are non-comparable, this study investigated the effect of the combination of peer and self-directed feedback across the students’ English proficiency levels. The purpose of this study is to verify the three-fold research questions namely whether the students who are given combination of peer and self-directed feedback have better writing ability than those who are not given combination of peer and self-directed feedback as well as whether high and low English proficiency levels of the students’ make difference in the results of the feedback effect. Employing a quasi-experimental research with posttest only, this study involved a control and an experimental group. The subjects of this study were 57 sixth semester students enrolled in Writing IV course. The overall ten meetings including six meetings for treatment were carried out. At the end, the subjects were given a writing test to write an argumentative essay and the data were used to answer the research questions. After that, the collected data were statistically computed by using independent sample t-test to find if there was any significant difference on the scores between the control and the experimental groups, high proficient students in the control and the experimental groups, and low proficient students in the control and the experimental groups. The results pointed out that the students who were given the combination of peer and self-directed feedback had better writing ability than the students who were not given the combination of peer and self-directed feedback as shown by p-value .000 was smaller than the .05 level of significance. Then, the high proficient students in the experimental group had better writing ability than the control group as well with p-value .008 was smaller than the .05 level of significance, while the p-value on the low proficient students was .217 which was greater than the .05 level of significance showing that the there was no significant different. It was established empirically that the combination of peer and self-directed feedback affected the students’ writing ability positively, and that English proficiency levels influenced the effect of the combination of peer and self-directed feedback. These findings implied that the combination of peer and self-directed feedback is recommended for the high proficient students, while teacher feedback is given to low proficient students. Future researchers in this field are suggested to probe more concern on why the low proficient students did not benefit from the peer and self-directed feedback and to investigate the effect across other students’ differences factors