Student Engagement With Peer Feedback In Projectbased EFL Writing

As a key indicator of students’ learning effort,student engagement serves as an important factor affecting students’ learning self-efficacy and academic performance.Research on EFL（English as a foreign language）writing has shown that high-quality student engagement plays an imperative part in second language writing skill development.Nevertheless,so far,much attention has been paid to student engagement with teacher feedback while less attention was paid to student engagement with peer feedback.As a critical part in L2 writing,peer feedback has great potential for promoting learners’ writing competence.Thus,this research systematically investigated student engagement with peer feedback in the project-based EFL writing course from three dimensions: behavioral,cognitive and affective engagement.To address the above question,the current research explored college students’ performance as both feedback givers and receivers respectively in a project-based EFL writing course at a 985 university in China to reveal the dynamic and complex relationships between the three dimensions of student engagement with peer feedback.Students were required to collaboratively write English project reports as a group.After they submitted their first drafts,each group would give feedback to another group and meanwhile receive feedback from its counterpart.Then all groups were required to revise their draft reports and submit the final versions.Multiple sources of data were collected,including the original group project reports,the drafts with written comments from the other group,the revised drafts,video recordings of inter-group feedback,questionnaires survey on all students,and focus-group interviews.In order to explore the students’ behavioral engagement data,all the feedback remarks and revision clues were identified and coded according to error types（form-focused versus content-focused feedback）,feedback explicitness（direct versus indirect feedback）and types of revision operations（strict alignment,deletion,substitution,etc.）.Cognitive and affective engagement were analyzed through the data obtained from questionnaire survey,focus-group interviews and group feedback discussion videos.Results showed that all the groups demonstrated high behavioral,cognitive,and affective engagement during peer feedback activity.In terms of behavioral engagement,learners were not only able to give substantial form-focused feedback,but also provide a lot of meaningful content-focused feedback to their peers.This result indicated that with appropriate project-based task design,college students could provide in-depth feedback on both language form and content.Meanwhile,the five groups showed different engagement patterns in terms of feedback-giving and revision process and they could be divided into three categories: strong in feedback-giving group,strong in feedbackreceiving group and balanced group which was equally strong in giving and receiving feedback.The strong feedback-giving group offered the most amount of feedback among all groups while refused to accept most of the received feedback.On the contrary,the strong feedback-receiving group offered comparatively less feedback but they were willing to accept the received feedback and adopted a variety of revision operations such as strict alignment,deletion,substitution,etc.Cognitively,video and focus-group interview data suggested that various cognitive and meta-cognitive strategies were adopted by all groups in giving and receiving feedback.Additionally,students were selective when responding to others’ suggestions because they did not blindly accept all the feedback provided by their counterparts.This represents a high level of cognitive efforts involved during this revision process.Affectively,the questionnaire results showed that students had positive attitudes towards peer feedback and they highly recognized the value of peer feedback as well.They admitted to have benefited a lot from peer feedback activity both as feedback givers and receivers.Overall,theoretically,the similarities and differences among the five groups further our understanding about the dynamic and complex relationships among the three dimensions of student engagement.Practically,the current results shed pedagogical implications on EFL writing course design so as to better promote student engagement with peer feedback.