Different dimensions of teacher and peer assessment of EFL learners’ writing: descriptive and narrative genres in focus

Abstract

The present study explored the extent to which teacher assessment (TA) and peer assessment (PA) differ in terms of magnitude and patterns of distribution across English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners’ descriptive and narrative writing performance. Twenty Persian-speaking EFL learners were non-randomly selected and voluntarily participated in a 12-session writing course at a private language school in Iran. Their performance on descriptive and narrative writing tasks was subjected to PA and TA sequentially. The West Virginia Department of Education descriptive writing rubric (with five components of organization, development, sentence structure, word choice and grammar, and mechanics) and Smarter Balanced narrative writing rubric (with five categories of narrative focus, organization, elaboration of narrative, language and vocabulary, and conventions) were adopted to schematize and analyze the distribution of the TA and PA comments. The results of frequency analysis indicated that TA far outnumbered PA on both descriptive and narrative genres of writing. Furthermore, on both descriptive and narrative writings, TA and PA commentaries were local in scope, form-focused, fluctuating, and inconsistent. Also, the distribution of TA and PA comments mainly focused on the conventions of narrative writings, while other macro-components of narrative writing had a steady and depleted pattern. The statistical results confirmed the significance of the observed differences between the number and the nature of TA and PA on descriptive and narrative genres of writing. The researchers made their concluding remarks on the probable causes of observed diversities, imposed limitations of the study, and a number of topics for future research.