Developing An Empirically-Derived Diagnostic Checklist To Guide Peer Assessment In EFL Writing Classroom From A Cross-Cultural Peer Review Program

This study was conducted under a program of a non-rubric referenced cross-cultural peer review activity in which English as a Foreign Language(EFL)college students in China and native college students from America participated.The two-phase study aims to explore both EFL college students' and American native students' perception of evaluating writing,from which this study intends to empirically construct a diagnostic checklist for peer assessment in EFL writing classroom.In the first phase of this study,the author had a detailed examination of the written feedback generated by students from both sides and described how students' attention was drawn to different aspects of writing in their evaluating process.In the second phase,since the written feedback provided rich descriptions of how students attended to various textual features of writing,it was used as the empirical data from which the author elicited a variety of distinctive performance descriptors to construct a diagnostic checklist for peer assessment in EFL writing context.16 sophomore college English majors(14 females and 2 males)and 16 American native students(11 females and 5 males)participated in the non-rubric referenced peer review activity.They each was required to write an argumentative essay based on his/her understanding of two movies they watched beforehand.Then they were divided into 8 groups,with 2 Chinese students and 2 native students in each group,and began to provide diagnostic written feedback to each other.The first-phase research mainly adopted the constant comparative method(Glaser and Strauss 1967)based on grounded theory to inductively analyze their written comments.The results revealed that the textual features they chose to comment on mainly fell into six dimensions,including content,organization,language use,vocabulary,mechanics and reader consideration.Specifically,these dimensions further include 17 subcategories referring to 17 specific sub-skills of writing.The second phase analysis drew on the empirically-based method of instrument development as the theoretical basis and initially derived 41 distinctive performance descriptors from students' written comments.Then the descriptors were further reviewed and refined based on the writing literature and experts' judgment.Some descriptors were eliminated as invalid,and some new descriptors were added as complementary writing construct.Finally,34 effective descriptors were formulated and used to construct a diagnostic checklist for formative peer assessment in EFL writing classroom.The result provided a useful diagnostic evaluating tool for supporting peer assessment in EFL writing classroom and indicated the feasibility of designing assessment instrument from the students' perception of assessing writing.