Another Point of View

English title: Another Point of View The aim of this study is to find traces of learning in the process of peer response. This is explored by investigating the experiences expressed by the students and their work of trans­forming criteria into peer response questions. An analysis is also made of which criteria they focus on in their feedback. A close-up study of the meeting between the student, the response group and the text has been made consisting of three students and their groups. The teacher has ranked the groups from her expectations of their performances. Analytical tools are the criteria themselves, metalanguage (Hansson 2001) and local and global text levels (Hoel 2001). The theoretical framework is taken from Ewa Bergh Nestlog and her thesis from 2012. Based on systematic functional linguistics, critical discourse analysis and a dialogical conception of language she presents a transaction cycle. The transaction cycle explains the connection between metaunderstanding, the production and the reception of texts, and it is used in this study for understanding peer response. The study explores how Swedish students in upper secondary school make meaning in peer response. Eighteen students aged 16–17 have digitally been receiving and providing feedback in groups of three while writing an argumentative text. All the students are following a theoretical curriculum. Sources for the material are various written texts by the students. The data analysed consists of the students’ questions to the criteria, their feedback comments on Google Drive and their self-evaluations. The analysis of the self-evaluations shows that receiving and giving feedback helps the students to use a metaperspective while writing and editing their own texts. The students describe how the teaching activities and materials focusing on structure in text have helped them to focus on structure when giving a response. This is confirmed by the analysis of the feedback which shows that the students in their comments give critical and concrete feedback on structure using an adequate language. The results indicate that the chosen focus of teaching activities influences the focus of the students’ response and writing. The results also indicate a need for more teaching activities concerning grammatical terms. The close-up study shows that the students in the groups highly valued by their teacher have an ability to adjust their feedback according to both the text and their peers. The group less valued by their teacher gives very little response and the students do not participate in the self-evaluation.