The effect of different types of peer feedback provision on EFL students' writing performance

Abstract

Writing in English is often claimed as the most complex skills compared to the other three skills. Due to its complexity, feedback is seen to be an important part in writing process since it can lead to the students' better writing performance. It has been a consensus that teacher feedback is not practical to be given in a class with a big number of students; thus, this challenges peer feedback to be implemented in the writing classroom. While there are studies showing that peer feedback is effective to enhance the students' writing performance, how peer feedback should be conducted has been overlooked and limited. In this study, we investigated the effect of two types of peer feedback provision on the students' writing performance. This study involved 55 EFL students of the English Department of a state university in Indonesia. The study revealed that both in-class peer feedback provision and small group peer feedback provisiom led to the students' better writing performance. Nonetheless, neither of these two was more effective than the other. This indicates that regardless of the types of peer feedback provision, the results will be the same.