The Effects of Peer Feedback and Self-Correction on Writing Ability: A Case of Social Network Medium
University of Technology North Bangkok
ABSTRACT
The purposes of this research were 1) to study the effects of peer feedback and self-correction on the student’s writing ability; 2) to ascertain which writing aspect the student improved most and least; and 3) to investigate the student’s attitudes toward peer feedback and self- correction. The samples of this study were 60 undergraduate students from the Faculty of Engineering at King Mongkut’s University of Technology North Bangkok enrolled in Writing I course in the second semester of academic year 2014. Thirty students were randomly assigned to the control group employing the self-correction strategy, while 30 students in the experimental group used a peer feedback strategy via Facebook. The stratified random sampling technique was used in this study for subject selection and assignment. At the beginning of the writing course, both groups were trained for 6 hours on how to provide effective feedback to their peers and how to correct their own writing task. The writing ability test and close-ended questionnaire were used for the quantitative data collection. An independent t-test and descriptive statistics were used to analyze the data. To gain more in- depth data, an open-ended questionnaire and interviews were employed. The findings showed that the different types of feedback did not have a significant effect on the students’ writing achievement. Additionally, the results showed that both groups had positive attitudes toward the type of feedback they experienced. However, the use of social networking a site in the writing process also yielded some promising results for EFL writing instruction.
KEYWORDS
Peer feedback, Self-correction, Writing ability, Student’s attitudes