Myth 1: ESL Students Give Bad Peer Feedback

Since peer feedback requires a student to give corrections to another student, it is usually perceived as an activity that greatly benefits students with weaker writing skills, but has little to no benefit for strong writers. The logic behind this viewpoint is that weaker writers will get more feedback and corrections, while strong writers will get no changes to make. Another opinion stemming from this is that peer review is most effective and beneficial when your writings are being reviewed by a writer of superior skill level. As a result, ESL students and students with other students who struggle with writing are perceived to be of no help during peer feedback. These views were confirmed in the survey I sent out to fellow students in my UWP1Y class. In response to a question asking respondents to describe experiences, either positive or negative, relating to peer feedback, multiple responded by saying that they sometimes found peer feedback to be unbeneficial or even frustrating. Respondents voiced their anger with the quality of their peer review writing, “I have had people edit my essay that did not know what they were doing,” while others complained about lack of effort responding, “most of my negative experiences with peer response have been when the person giving feedback on my essay was clearly just doing it for the participation credit and didn’t really provide helpful tips for me.” However, studies conducted by University of Hawaii professor, George Jacobs, have proven these opinions to be false as nearly every peer suggestion improves the quality of one’s writing.

To conduct his study, Jacobs studied the essays of 18 ESL students at a University in Thailand. The students were assigned a topic, wrote an essay on it, and then were assigned another student’s essay to peer review. Students made corrections to the essay they were assigned and then the corrections were then sorted based on the initial grammatical correctness and if the correction fixed the writing or not. The study found that 76% of all the suggested corrections improved the writing. In all of the suggestions there were only four implemented suggestions that made a grammatically correct phrase incorrect. However, they were all related to articles. (1989).

The data from the study shows that a large portion of the corrections suggested by ESL students are beneficial, despite the views many may hold. Over 75% of all their suggestions were correct showing that ESL students provide feedback that is beneficial and can help improve writings. Additionally, all the implemented corrections that worsened the essays were related to a single topic which most likely means that it was either incorrectly taught in class or not taught at all. This further proves that peer feedback from ESL and other students of weaker writing backgrounds can be trusted. It also disproves the view that suggestions from ESL students are often incorrect and will hinder a paper more than they will help a paper.