Learner Engagement With Reviewer Feedback From English Journals: A Case Study Of L2 Doctoral Candidates From A Sociocognitive Perspective

Feedback is a major tool in second language(L2)writing and has been proved effective in socializing learners into academic discourse(Kumar & Stracke,2007),helping them gain disciplinary membership(Li et al.,2017),facilitating independent learning(Bitchener et al.,2010)and so on.In recent years,studies on it have gradually shifted from optimizing the feedback features to monitoring how learners engage with feedback in their naturalistic revision environment.Learner engagement thus has been widely explored with various feedback like automated feedback,peer feedback,and teacher feedback.However,researchers have been more concerned with written corrective feedback(WCF)and the context of classroom writing(Fan &Xu,2020;Han & Hyland,2015;Koltovskaia,2020;Shen & Chong,2022;Zhang &Hyland,2018;Zheng & Yu,2018).In higher education context,accompanied by the explicit rule of “publish or no degree”(Shamsi & Osam,2022),postgraduates write for purposes outside the classroom,the most important being publication of research papers,than learn-to-write.For L2 doctoral candidates,they faced a dual difficulty of writing in their discipline and a foreign language,whose engagement with reviewer feedback is seriously underexplored.In light of these,the case study aims to explore doctoral candidates’ cognitive,affective and behavioral engagement with reviewer feedback and the interplay of the three dimensions based on the framework of Han and Hyland(2015).A sociocognitive perspective was adopted to view learner engagement as a mind-body-world ecology.Four doctoral candidates in science from first-class universities were selected as participants.Audio data including interviews and stimulated recalls,as well as textual data of reviewer feedback,response letters,together with first and revised drafts of manuscripts were collected for triangulation.Findings indicated that the engagement of four learners across the three dimensions was deep.Changes over time and individual differences were evident under the inseparability,adaptivity and alignment principles of sociocognitive perspective.Compared with experienced contributors,novice learners followed more feedback,developed deeper feedback literacy,and suffered greater imbalance of the three dimensions.The complicated engagement pattern was jointly mediated by a multitude of learner factors like language proficiency,genre knowledge,disciplinary knowledge,learner belief and feedback experience,and contextual factors such as feedback features,interpersonal relationship as well as available resources.As regards the cognitive engagement,three learners achieved the processing level of understanding with internal or external support except Swan.They deployed six cognitive strategies(reasoning,activating prior knowledge,conceptualizing with details,conceptualizing broadly,going beyond the immediate data,and updating prior knowledge)and three metacognitive strategies(planning,monitoring,and evaluation)to promote mental efforts in revision.The final publication result bore witness to learners’ active revision operations.Addition,deletion and substitution were mainly found among learners across the morpheme,word,phrase,clause,sentence,paragraph and other levels as well as genre parts.83.97% of feedback was revised following the reviewer on average and the highest number of operations reached 624 in total.They deployed strategies of turning to social network and open resources,reviewing notes,and organizing the learning environment.Affective engagement was evidenced by multiple emotions with three-level valence and activation in social,topic,epistemic and achievement foci.Notably,depression,luck,a sense of inferiority,objectivity,a clear conscience,and recognition were newly found.Learners made use of situation selection,situation modification,attention deployment,cognitive change,and response modulation to mitigate affective fluctuations.The dynamic and interdependent nature among dimensions of learner engagement was detected,under the influence of internal factors of revision goal,feedback experience,prior knowledge and perceived complexity of revision,as well as contextual factors like feedback focus,quality,tone,time and type.The research contributes to empirical studies in the less-researched context of academic publication,verifies the multifaceted,contextualized and individual-based nature of learner engagement with feedback,and implies practical significance for peer review,learners and the academic community.The study advocates more caution on the consistency of research field between reviewers and the submitted articles,an integrated training system for reviewers and a two-way channel for learners to defend their rights.Learners are suggested to prepare themselves with necessary strategies and knowledge.Viewing publication as a goal of the academic community involving peers,seniors and supervisors,collaborative writing is promising to realize the mutual facilitation of co-regulation and self-regulation.