Peer Response in Upper Secondary School : Do Swedish students find it useful for improving their English writing skills?

The method of peer response has become an important part in process oriented writing classes and is often used at universities, but not in upper secondary school. The aim of this paper is to investigate how students in upper secondary school react when introduced to peer response, and whether or not they find it a beneficial way of working when trying to improve their writing. The aim is also to find out if the students’ texts improve as a result of a peer response session. The results of my investigation show that the majority of the students who participated had positive reactions when introduced to peer response. All students agreed that the method was beneficial to improving their texts. Furthermore, according to the teacher, who read both the first and final versions of the texts, many of the students improved their texts enough after peer response to raise their grades. This confirms that peer response is, in fact, a good method to use when trying to improve students’ writing. However, even though the majority of the participants were positive to the idea of using peer response again, there were some students who prefer that only the teacher reads their assignments. This could be due to a lack of confidence concerning their own abilities or the fact that some texts are perceived as too personal and private. There will often be students who do not like to share their writing but the method could be modified and adapted to the situation of each class. Peer response can be combined with teacher response, or the groups can be reduced to pairs of two persons