An Investigation of EFL Students’ and Teachers’ Attitudes Towards Peer Review VS. Teacher Feedback in Enhancing students’ Writing Skill:

Abstract

The present study aims at investigating the attitudes of teacher feedback versus peer review on enhancing EFL students’ writing proficiency, at the English Department, Guelma University. Accordingly, it is hypothesized that relying only on peer review will improve EFL students’ writing skill achievements and that receiving both peer and teacher review/feedback will enhance EFL students’ writing skill achievements. To verify the validity of these hypotheses, a descriptive method has been conducted in which two questionnaires were administered for both teachers of Written Expression module and Master One students of English Department, Guelma University (who are considered to be the source of the collected data). Thus, the aim behind those questionnaires was to gather sufficient and suitable data about their attitudes towards the importance and the effectiveness of teacher and peer feedback in enhancing their writing capacities; for the sake of testing the previously mentioned hypotheses via the analysis of the collected data. Therefore, the obtained results have shown that peer review and teacher feedback are effective tools to enhance students’ writing proficiency, and that students prefer to receive feedback from both their teachers and peers; however, they favor their peer feedback to be guided by the teacher and not directly receive their peers’ feedback. The results also revealed that teachers have positive attitudes toward peer review and they believe that if students receive feedback from their peers along with their teachers’ feedback, their writing level will be improved. Therefore, these findings have confirmed the research second hypothesis: receiving both teacher and peer feedback improves EFL students’ writing proficiency and have rejected the first hypothesis that peer review alone enhances EFL students’ writing achievements.