Talking about writing – designing and establishing writing feedback and tutorials to promote student engagement and learning

This article describes different feedback designs that have been developed at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden. These feedback activities are part of courses and programmes that faculty at the Department of Communication and Learning in Science, Division for Language and Communication, are involved in. The feedback setup has evolved from many years of designing and delivering writing instruction within STEM education, grounded in the challenge to make feedback a meaningful learning experience for all students and improve students’ understanding of disciplinary academic writing. The feedback designs described are based on dialogue to provide feedback and as a means for students to verbalize their own understanding of text, textual features and how discipline specific content is communicated. Examples of setups are large class active feedback lectures, scaffolded peer response sessions, and guided feedback workshops. These feedback activities are explored, and we argue for how they, potentially, result in more (useful) feedback and feedforward compared to traditional written teacher-student feedback.

PEER RESPONSE IN LANGUAGE TEACHER TRAINING: STUDENTS’ PEDAGOGIC APPROACHES AND POSITIONING

Although peer response is increasingly used in English as a foreign language (EFL) courses within European higher education (HE), very little research has been carried out to explore its efficacy within specific sociocultural contexts outside of the Asia-Pacific region, and much of the research into peer response has been limited to English as a second language rather than EFL contexts (Yu & Lee, 2016). Students’ positioning of themselves relative to the authors of the texts they review and the texts themselves reveals significant information about how their culture and context impact their approach to peer response. As such, this study examined 119 written peer response texts of EFL teachers in training in a Norwegian HE institution. It found that the low power distance in Norway combined with a shared cultural belief that one should not show hubris impacted students’ ability to provide critical comments to their peers, as well as the manner in which comments were made.

PERCEPTION OF JAPANESE LEARNERS TOWARDS ONLINE PEER RESPONSE ACTIVITIES

Technological advances have led to developments in language learning techniques; one of the techniques is the online peer response. The purpose of this study was to determine the perceptions of Japanese language learners of Indonesia towards online peer response activities. This research is survey research. The respondents of this study are 22 Indonesian intermediate level Japanese language learners. The result of this study is the students' perception of peer response activities that cannot be said to be positive. However, learners still feel the benefits of this activity.