Applying Peer-Review Checklist to Improve Vietnamese EFL University Students’ Writing Skills

Abstract

This study was an attempt to investigate the effect of peer-review checklists on Vietnamese EFL students’ writing performance and students’ feedback on the application of the peer-review checklist. The quasi-experimental study was conducted with fifty-eight non-English major students at a university in the Mekong Delta. The participants were divided into an experimental group and a control group. A mixed-methods intervention design was applied, in which data were collected from a pre-test, a post-test and a focus-group interview. The results of the triangulation analysis, which compared datasets from the instruments, revealed that EFL students utilizing a peer-review checklist performed better than did their peers in the control group. More specifically, students in the experimental group had significant progress in terms of task fulfilment and utilizing vocabulary. The results also indicated that most students’ feedback on the use of the checklist was positively noticed. Although the findings of the study are limited because of the small sample, use of peer review checklists in writing classes is recommended for EFL students in tertiary contexts with some suggested cautions.