| The past few decades have seen language practitioners explore various computer-mediated platforms to enhance peer review activities and foster L2 writing skills.Online peer review can be a catalyst for effective learning provided that the reviewer-reviewee exchange is clear,constructive,and put into practice.Learning from and with each other enables students to reflect upon their own work(Liu & Hansen Edwards,2018;Race,2014).Next to the educational value and transferable skills,peer review has the potential to unburden writing instructors and facilitate peer interaction in a scalable way(Cho & Schunn,2007;Wanner & Palmer,2018).As such,many studies focus on the educational design of peer review activities;however,hitherto,limited attention has been given to student engagement in this domain-specific area.Although recent studies shed light on L2 learners’ engagement with peer feedback(i.e.,Fan &Xu,2020;Hoo et al.,2020),they primarily focused on how students responded to the feedback received from peers rather than how they engaged as feedback givers.Research investigating features and development trajectories of engagement from the perspective of feedback givers is still in its infancy.However,the computer-mediated mode indicates the potential for exploring the dynamism of student engagement and performance outcomes on various timescales.Before proceeding further,it may be helpful to define what this study means by the term online peer review,which is used as an umbrella concept to designate a series of text revision-oriented reciprocal learning activities for students to give and receive peer feedback through Peerceptiv,a peer assessment platform.Specifically,online peer review involves students uploading their first drafts of English essays as writers,offering written comments as feedback givers,back-evaluating the helpfulness of peer responses as feedback receivers,and revising previous work as suggested.Within peer review,the act of giving written comments by identifying strengths/weaknesses and addressing the areas for remedial actions is perceived as peer feedback.Informed by previous studies,this study operationalizes engagement in online peer review as students’ responses to randomly assigned peer essays,which can be manifested in the dimensions of behavior,cognition,and emotion.Specifically,behavioral engagement refers to the behavioral efforts that students invested in when offering feedback.It can be studied from three sub-dimensions:revision-oriented criticism,well-founded praise,and only praise.Cognitive engagement is operationalized by measuring the inclusion of cognitive features in peer comments in terms of identification,localization,suggestion,solution,and explanation.Emotional engagement corresponds with students’ emotional responses towards offering feedback online.Flow theory,as well as the process approach to writing and cooperative learning theory,provides overarching theoretical foundations for explaining the occurrence of student engagement in online peer review of writing.Flow,or the optimal experience,is a positive psychology concept characterized by a perceived skills-challenge balance,clear goals,a sense of control,and ongoing feedback(Csikszentmihalyi,1996;Egbert,2003).The key components of the present study match the conditions attributable to the flow experience.In addition,the study fits well within the process writing approach for it facilitates learners to discover and negotiate intended meaning and ideas repeatedly when generating feedback and revising drafts.Engaging students in online peer review is also rooted in cooperative learning theory;therefore,it facilitates peer scaffolding in a virtual community of practice.This longitudinal exploratory study incorporated rubric-referenced,prompt-driven online peer review activities in a first-year elementary EFL writing course during two consecutive semesters.The participants were 76 English major undergraduates at a research-oriented university in China.Argumentative writing was chosen for students to review from four dimensions: argument components with reference to the adapted Toulmin model(Qin & Karabacak,2010;Toulmin,1958,2004;Verheij,2005),effectiveness of argumentation,grammar and vocabulary,and language style.Specifically,the present study aimed at answering the following research questions:1.How do first-year English major undergraduates engage in online peer review as feedback givers?2.How do students self-report their engagement when providing feedback to peers?3.How does student engagement influence students’ feedback performance in the four rounds of online peer review activities?To answer these questions,this study collected multiple sources of qualitative and quantitative data,including 76 participants’ 1,217 examples of written peer feedback,304 preliminary drafts of argumentative essays,1,217 back-evaluation comments,304 reflective journals,transcripts of five semi-structured interviews,and responses to a self-report engagement survey.The data analysis consisted of five parts: 1)textual analysis of peer comments which were segmented into 22,194 idea units(continuous comments on a single-issue topic)to reveal students’ behavioral and cognitive engagement,as well as peer comment quality and quantity;2)sentiment analysis of reflections to explore students’ emotional engagement;3)quantitative analysis of the survey data to unveil how students self-reported their engagement;4)the rating of the first drafts of four writing assignments to examine writing development;and 5)qualitative analysis of interviews and back-evaluation comments.All the textual data were double coded and rated;the quantitative data were processed by using SPSS 20.0.In answering the first research question,the analytical framework has led to the findings that overall students could manage to invest sufficient behavioral and cognitive effort into feedback provision with positive emotion and a consistency in the relationships among the three constructs of engagement over time was found.There were significantly positive high correlations between behavioral engagement and cognitive engagement.However,emotional engagement showed low positive correlations with these two dimensions.Salient features and development trajectories of each engagement dimension were analyzed and discussed in depth.For the second research question,students’ responses to the self-report survey have led the author to conclude that students had a positive perception towards their engagement from the perspective of the feedback giver.The six factors of self-report engagement,such as online performance,interpersonal communication,feedback strategies,task management,reviewer confidence,and value recognition,were significantly correlated with substantive engagement.The last research question concerned the performance outcomes of feedback provision and their relationship with student engagement.It was confirmed that the more behavioral and cognitive effort students invested,the more likely they generated longer comments of higher quality and achieved greater score gains in EFL writing at the end of the study.Specifically,both peer comment quantity and quality maintained continuous growth trends over time.In addition,the overall scores of students’ first drafts across the four writing assignments increased significantly.All writing dimensions showed significant upward trends except argument components.Students’ performance outcomes had significant moderate,positive correlations with behavioral and cognitive engagement but a significant low,positive correlation with emotional engagement.It is worth noting that cognitive efforts into identification,solution,and suggestions and behaviors of offering revisionoriented criticism were more attributable to students’ learning outcomes.This study also revealed English proficiency had no significant impact on students’ substantive and self-report engagement.University EFL learners,whether of high or low proficiency,if welltrained,could competently engage in offering feedback behaviorally,cognitively,and emotionally.The three engagement components fluctuated over time but displayed an overall upward trend.This might send an assuring message to those who still doubt whether peer review is feasible with students of mixed levels of English proficiency.Though much remains to be investigated,the results of this study provided promising evidence for one specific feedback technique that can help provide EFL writing educators with a valid conceptual framework and new perspective of research.Given that student engagement and active learning have become ubiquitous,future studies can compare student engagement features in different peer review modes and investigate how the contextual factors and individual differences influence student engagement. |
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