"Well done!" : A study of Upper Secondary School Students' Written Peer Response

The chief aim of this study is to investigate the impact of context on written peer response. A second aim is to explore students’ attitudes towards peer response. The investigation has taken place at an upper secondary school in the south-east of Sweden, involving 20 students in grade 2 and 3 in the course Swedish C. The investigation is based on the students’ comments on their peers’ speech drafts and six qualitative interviews. The material embraces 211 comments, all of which are analysed by use of methods from SFL. The theoretical frame is founded on Grice’s (1975) principle of communication and Brown & Levinson’s (1987) principle of politeness. The investigation shows, among other things, that in the choice between giving effective response (according to the principle of communication), or giving response that maintain the social balance (according to the principle of politeness), the students in general choose the latter. This is reflected in the results of the linguistic analysis and confirmed in the six interviews