Exploring the Effectiveness of Using Peer Evaluation and Teacher Feedback in College Students' Writing

Peer evaluation is a teaching method by which students exchange written drafts of their work with their colleagues for the purpose of appraisal. The use of this method has become well known and widely adopted in the L1 classroom environment (Beach, 1989). However, English writing courses have been considered as one of the most difficult subjects for most ESL/EFL (English as a second language/English as a foreign language) English teachers This study investigated the perspectives of using peer evaluation and teacher's feedback in terms of implicit and explicit correction in a writing class on one interne platform from 50 third-year students in the Department of Applied Foreign Languages at one University of Science and Technology in central Taiwan. Interviews from the writing teacher were conducted twice during the semester. A questionnaire for students was also employed in this study. The results of the study showed that most students had positive comments on peer evaluation. However, dependency on more teacher's feedback and doubts on peer's abilities were also discussed in the paper.