PEER-EDITING PRACTICES IN THE WRITING CLASSROOM

Peer editing is a learning strategy in which a student evaluates another student's

work and provides feedback. This is a standard strategy used in writing courses across the
curriculum. However, instituting peer review in a course requires forethought and
organization, since without careful planning the exercise can become meaningless for
students and frustrating for instructors. When it is well done it benefits both students and
faculty; it can help develop critical thinking and writing skills and make your marking easier.
Peer editing generally refers to commenting on a paper's organization, tone, format,
flow, grammar, punctuation, and even content. When reviewing a paper for content,
students assess whether there is a well-defined thesis statement, the depth to which the
topic was adequately covered, assumptions and biases, and the strength of the paper's
argument. In their written responses, peer editors must give constructive and honest
commentary that acknowledges a paper's strengths, suggests possible improvements or
identifies problem areas, and provides grammar, style, referencing, or other mechanical
corrections. Authors become aware that they must write so that their readers can
understand their argument and that they are responsible for accepting or rejecting advice
or alternative points of view.
Many studies confirm the benefits of peer editing. First of all, it can stimulate
students to put more effort to write since their writing will be read by their classmates, not
only by their teachers. It encourages them to write more and learn to improve their stories
(Calkins, 1986; White & Arndt, 1991; Rollinson, 2005; Wichadee, 2010). Students can also
gain more knowledge to improve their own writing such as different writing styles, different
points of views, or new vocabulary. Furthermore, it gives students an opportunity to play
roles as a writer and a reader. They can gain the sense of audience (Keh, 1990; Kroll,
1991) which can help them to see more clearly what audiences need to know when
reading someones story. White and Arndt (1991) add that students need to learn to
evaluate and write a response to each others writing. Therefore, it can develop their
capacity for self-assessment and critical thinking skills. Moreover, Calkin (1986, 10) states
that peer editing can create a leaning community in the classroom and everyone in it must
be both a teacher and a student. Consequently, peer editing can give many benefits to
students as they can learn from each other.

Peer editing practice has been proven through research to have positive effects on
students revision types and quality of texts (Berg, 1999; Min, 2006). Despite such positive
findings, a number of research and experts have disclosed issues and problems that need
to be addressed prior to implementation of peer editing practice in class. One main
problem with peer editing is the low quality of feedback received. A study by Leki (1990)
disclosed students concerns over quality of feedback; the critical and sarcastic tones used
and sincerity of peer reviewers. In addition, Flynns (1982 as cited in Stanley, 1992, p. 219)
study revealed peer reviewers offered unhelpful and unfocused feedback to their writing
partners. Students may also produce rubber stamp advice, imitating their own teachers
response to their writing (Leki, 1990, Min, 2005). Students correction may also centre on
grammar and vocabulary problems (Myles, 2004). Furthermore, students may tend to
address surface errors and often fail to respond to problems in meaning (Stanley, 1992).
Leki (1990) further posits that students who lack communication and pragmatic skills may
not be able to convey quality peer responses. In situations where students are from
different cultures, cultural misunderstanding may occur. Some cultures may refuse to
accept student-centred activities (Mangelsdorf, 1992) and may find group work very
threatening and bewildering particularly if the culture prohibits verbal criticism due to the
need to save face (White, 1994, p. 115). In some learning environment where the teacher
is viewed as the only one real reader-- the person who gave the grade (Sengupta, 1996,
p. 25), peer editing may not work at all.
According to Berg (1999), responding to writing is not a skill that students are
familiar with and requires the needs for opportunities to learn to respond to writing. In order
for peer editing sessions to be effective, many researchers thus advocate the need to pretrain or coach the students. (Stanley, 1992; Berg, 1999, Rollinson, 2005; Min, 2006). Gere
(1987 cited in Berger, 1990, p. 28) advocates the need to nurture students trust,
collaborative skills and critique writing in order to produce successful writing groups.
Hansen and Liu (2005) suggest the need for teachers to first model the process of peer
response and to provide ample time to familiarise students with peer response procedures.
Due to the demand that peer editing practice relies on the importance of coaching or pretraining, it is thus unsurprising to find many writing teachers excluding peer editing
sessions from their classes as they can be both lengthy and time consuming (Rollinson,
2005, p.23).

The value of peer editing is still skeptical to many English teachers because they
are not sure about the quality of feedback that students give to their peers as well as it is a
time consuming technique. It may be not worth spending time doing it because ESL/EFL
students may think that their peers have the same or lower level of English proficiency as
they have; therefore, they question if their peer editing is really correct. Thus, they do not
take their peer editing seriously or even ignore it (Hyland, 2000). Moreover, some students
do not feel comfortable to exchange their paper with their classmates. They may not want
their classmate to see their writing because they do not have confidence in their own
writing proficiency. They do not want to humiliate themselves. Moreover, after reading their
peers paper, they may feel reluctant to give feedback to their peers, especially a negative
one. Students may not be confident in their own abilities. In some cases, if they have to
read a paper from a classmate who they know has higher English proficiency than they do,
they are reluctant to give any negative feedback. Instead, they may only give short and
general feedback such as good or very interesting story. Their peers will not be able to
learn anything from such simple feedback. As a result, the peer editing may be just a timewasting activity that makes students feel uncomfortable.
The main purpose of peer revision and peer-editing is to help students learn the
written language at a deeper level. We all know it is easier to see errors in writing that is
fresh rather than in writing that we have been looking at for a while. For this reason, peerediting gives students a chance to work with the language by helping each other, and
through this exchange, learn more about their own writing. This step in the writing process
actually takes more class and teacher time if done correctly and with the appropriate
modeling and scaffolding, but I have found it to be a highly successful way of helping
students to see their own writing from a different perspective if the class is full with great
student. Only a few of my students are able to help each other with their writing. Teaching
and learning need more time while using the method, and both can really hard to start if
that there aren't motivation and guide. I'm still thinking about using peer editing in my
class. Some of the best students are good enough to correct or edit a text but not for the
other students. The point is that someone else can notice your mistakes but the others
seem to be lost in noticing.
Some students, regardless of whether they were working in groups or individually,
were not able to identify problems and strengths of others writing. One peer group who
edited another's writing, for example, indicated that the text was unclear when it was

clearly stated and even contained preview of main ideas. Another peer editor commented
that her partners text was the main aspect of the essay that needed to be improved when
in fact, nothing was wrong with it and it provided closure to her partners writing. Analysis
of the checklist also revealed students confusion.
Teaching and learning was not able to neither prove nor disprove the usefulness of
peer editing practice in improving students writing skills. (At the end of the lesson, the
objective in fact sounded ambitious). One of the main reasons was due to too much
teacher intervention during writing conferences. Students improvement in writing, if any,
may be owed to teachers feedback and not peers. Despite this, the study has proven the
usefulness of peer editing practice in other aspects, for example, in making the classroom
environment more interesting and challenging; in providing venues for students to share,
explore and identify different ideas and approach to responding to a writing task; and to
learn from one another particularly on different styles of writing. Analysis of data revealed,
through the three data collection methods, shows that drawbacks of peer editing practice
outweigh its benefits. One of the main drawbacks is the low quality of peer editors
feedback. Students giving out confusing, inappropriate or rubber stamp comments could
make peer feedback a detrimental process to students motivation level and most
importantly to their writing. Another drawback of peer feedback practice is the low
receptivity of the comments received from peers by nearly 40% of the students who took
part in the study. This, she believes, was due to improper grouping, limited guidelines
given and inadequate checklists.
One area that needs to be improved when using the method are the quality of
guidelines and the way they are provided. students were verbally guided throughout the
process. In the beginning they were verbally introduced to the practice where teachers
informed them of the benefits of such practice but in my teaching, I did not provide
guidelines in black and white. I believed that the checklists and the writing conferences
would be adequate to guide the students through the process. However, this was proven
wrong. If future, teachers should provide students with handouts on the following. Teacher
will model to the students, the appropriate comments to write on the essay and the
checklist and the symbols to use when editing others work. By doing this, she believes the
number of useless and inappropriate comments given will be limited, which would improve
the level of receptivity of peer comments and thus improve the usefulness of peer
feedback practice.

It is true that peer editing has many benefits to students in developing their writing.
It helps them enhance not only writing skills, but also reading skills, critical thinking skills,
and self-evaluation skills. However, for the Asian cultures, it seems to be difficult to get all
the benefits from the peer review technique since Asian students have cultural barriers.
Those barriers seem to be big and strong in a classroom. Teachers can find it hard to
persuade students to give sincere feedback to their peers or accept and follow the
feedback they receive. Nevertheless, regarding it benefits, the peer editing is still worth
using in the writing classroom. It becomes a teachers responsibility to help and prepare
students to be ready for this challenging technique. To successfully use the peer editing in
ESL/EFL classes, the suggestion is that teachers need to start with pointing out its benefits
to students and make them understand and agree to use it. Teachers and students need to
set a goal and agreement in using this technique together, and at the end of the course,
they need to evaluate the course together. After that, when students set their mind to
cooperate with teachers to willingly do this activity, teachers need to provide them with
tools to succeed such as demonstrate the whole process in class, give them enough
lessons to practice, provide them guidelines or checklists for giving feedback and make
themselves available for students to consult if they face any problems. Practicing is very
important because students will gain more confidence as they practice as well as they will
understand more clearly how to perform the technique. Furthermore, student writers would
probably understand student readers more since they know that the readers give feedback
as they are trained. They would understand that all feedback is for improvement, and not
for embarrassment. Students can gain trust and learn from each other without creating any
conflict. Even though students can help each other to respond or to edit each others work,
it does not mean that teachers will have less responsibility than before. Teachers need to
make students see that they never ignore the students or leave them alone when they are
correcting their work. In fact, teachers need to work twice as hard to prepare them and
lead them to the right way in order for both student writers and readers to get as many
benefits from the time they spend together. By the end of the course, if students still feel
that they have learned nothing from the activity, that means the teachers have not give
enough help to them. Consequently, although the peer editing is a learning technique
between students and students, it requires all of the teachers responsibilities to make it
successful.

As a result, using peer editing in the ESL and EFL classroom is not an easy
technique. Students may not gain any benefits from the feedback because they may not
receive a true and sincere feedback from their peers. However, it does not mean that their
peers want to do them any harm but, in fact, it means quite the opposite. They are afraid
that if they give bad comments, it would make their peers lose face. It would make them
feel embarrassed and finally, they might be angry with each other. They believe that this
situation can lead to conflict among the groups. Therefore, it is better for them and their
groups to decide to give only positive comments and ignore negative ones although they
actually know that those negative comments might help their peers improve their writing
more. Moreover, the student writers might not want to let their peers read their work. They
might feel that their peers might think that they are stupid if they write something wrong.
They never want to lose their face on that. Finally, Asian students probably prefer teachers
to give feedback over their peers since they do not feel embarrassed with their teachers,
and therefore, would not need to feel uncomfortable as they would if they give feedback to
their peers.

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