An Empirical Study On The Peer Feedback Uptake And Revision Outcome Of Advanced Chinese EFL Learners

The effectiveness of peer feedback in second language(L2)writing has attracted much attention in past decades,and a growing body of research attempts to investigate the efficacy of pre-feedback training or different feedback modes in reviewing process.However,the uptake process,an important step after feedback is provided,has been ignored.Furthermore,although low-and intermediate-proficiency learners in existing research on the utilization of peer feedback have been examined,little is known about how learners with high English language proficiency respond to peer feedback and to what extent they incorporate those comments in the revision process,which to some extent prevents advanced learners from effectively benefiting from peer feedback.Therefore,this study attempts to depict how advanced EFL learners respond to peer comments and how they correct their problems in subsequent drafts.In addition,the factors influencing peer feedback uptake and the effects of peer feedback on the corresponding modifications are examined.The study involves 16 English major sophomores,all of high proficiency in English,from a comprehensive university in China.In the study,students provide and receive two rounds of feedback and their writing performance after each round of feedback is examined in detail.At the end of the two rounds of feedback,students finish a reflective journal on the peer feedback process.Both quantitative and qualitative methods are used in this study.The quantitative data includes the peer feedback points and revision performance in a writing task.To further explore the uptake of peer comments with regard to different feedback types,peer feedback in the present study is classified according to feedback focus(surface-level and meaning-level)and feedback specificity(identifying problems only,providing general revision suggestions,offering specific revision solutions).The revision outcome is categorized as successful revision,unsuccessful revision and misunderstood revision.The reflective journals written by students are used for qualitative analysis.The major findings of the study are as follows.Firstly,advanced students adopt 80%of peer comments,which reflects a generally positive attitude towards peer feedback.Specifically,learners accept peer feedback with different uptake rates.In terms of feedback focus,although the uptake rate of meaning-level feedback(81%)is slightly higher than that of surface-level feedback(78%),the low uptake rate of structure-related comments(45%)in meaning-level feedback should be noticed.As for feedback specificity,the highest adoption rate of "offering specific revision solutions"comments(92%)shows that advanced learners tend to accept more elaborated comments.Secondly,with the assistance of peer feedback,participants make 383 revision operations and the overall "successful revision" rate accounts for 83%.Students are less successful in correcting "language use" issues in surface-level feedback and"structure" and "logic" issues in meaning-level feedback.With respect to feedback specificity,students show the highest"successful revision" rate when faced with"offering specific revision solutions" feedback(95%)and the lowest with "identifying problems only"(66%),indicating that students tend to be successful in correcting errors with more detailed revision suggestions or solutions.Thirdly,the factors that affect advanced students’ adoption of peer feedback can be both subjective and objective.Subjective factors refer to students’ personal reasons,such as their attitude towards peer feedback and their prior experience of peer feedback activities.Objective ones include the choice of language in the feedback process,the specificity of feedback and the affection embedded in comments.In addition,a majority of.participants hold that adopting peer comments is beneficial to subsequent revision process from many aspects:raising revision awareness,improving revision ability,and promoting cooperative revision.However,disagreement on the role of feedback still exists.This study takes high-proficiency students as the subjects to reveal their uptake degree of different feedback types and factors influencing the utilization of peer comments.It compensates for the lack of research on feedback uptake of advanced learners.Therefore,the paper can provide insights into how teachers guide highproficiency students to effectively make use of peer feedback and offer reference for the low-and intermediate-proficiency learners in writing pedagogy.Theoretically,examining the specific uptake process of peer feedback provides empirical evidence for L2 writing theories and makes a contribution to a comprehensive understanding of peer feedback and revision process.Finally,some limitations of the study are presented.