Digital self-review and anonymous peer feedback in Turkish high school EFL writing

Ayten Kayacan, Salim Razı

Abstract


Although writing is considered as one of the most essential foreign language skills, its development is quite challenging. To overcome their problems, recently teachers consider the ways of benefiting from digital technology. In this line, self-monitoring and self-evaluation as sub-skills of metacognition, in addition to scaffolding might be beneficial in accordance with Zone of Proximal Development. Hence, both peer feedback and self-monitoring could be integrated with the digital platforms in language classrooms. Within this perspective, the present quasi-experimental research study aimed to investigate the impact of exchanging self and anonymous peer feedback on writing assignments in a digital environment among Turkish EFL high school learners. The data were collected both quantitatively and qualitatively by means of open-ended questions and writing task scores through an analytic scoring rubric. Forty-six students in two intact classes exchanged both self and anonymous peer feedback through four writing assignments submitted via Edmodo as a digital environment. The participants were categorized as good, moderate and weak in each group and each student exchanged self and peer feedback in four written assignments in reverse order. The findings of the study revealed that both self and peer feedback contribute to student authors to revise their papers as they scored significantly better in revised versions. Their writing scores indicated improvement at five major components namely, organization, content, grammar, vocabulary, and format. The participants also reported improvement mainly related to content, grammar and format and indicated positive attitudes towards digital self and peer feedback. As both digital self and peer feedback were found to be beneficial, EFL teachers should be encouraged to implement them in their writing classes.

Keywords


digital environment; Edmodo; EFL writing; peer feedback; self-review

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References


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