Negotiation processes and text changes in Japanese learners' self-revisions and peer revisions of their written compositions in English

The purpose of the present study was to compare the processes and effects on the products (written texts) of second language (L2) writers' (a) self-revisions and their (b) peer revisions of their writing without any teacher instruction or feedback, as evaluated for quality by native speakers' (NSs') holistic and specific assessments. Participants were 24 Japanese university students of English as a foreign language (EFL). The units of analysis were negotiation episodes, text changes, and graphic symbols about their written texts. I categorized the types of negotiation from (a) the think-aloud protocols of participants' self-revisions and (b) transcriptions of their discussions during peer revisions. I also categorized their text changes using the same coding scheme of negotiation episodes. Other data included stimulated recall interviews with individual students.; The results indicated that these intermediate L2 learners could improve their drafts without any teacher instruction or feedback, particularly by revising the same kind of essay repeatedly, irrespective of the conditions of revision (p<.01 by the t-test). Most of the students' attention and text changes related to morphology and lexis, and students rarely paid attention to discourse-level features in both conditions of revision. Their negotiations and text changes were qualitatively and quantitatively different in the conditions of self-revision and peer revision. There was more meta-talk including meta-language during peer revisions than during self-revisions. Students tended to repeat L2 words when they focused on morphology and lexis during self-revisions. Despite students' considerable attention to inflectional changes in both conditions of revision, two NSs' assessments of these inflectional changes to the texts were mixed. Notably, the NSs did not tend to value highly the morphological changes, suggesting that writing instruction and teacher feedback could raise L2 writers' global-level awareness about this issue. Students employed graphic symbols differently in the processes of self-revision and peer revision. During self-revisions, students used some symbols as a form of mediation for their personal problem solving, whereas students wrote some symbols as a means of communication with each other during peer revisions.