The role of peer correction and teacher feedback in the improvement of writing skills in high school students

Abstract

Abstract: This study was aimedto analyze the role of peer correction and teacher feedbackin the improvement of writing skills in high school students focusing on theirefficacy for the improvement of semantic, syntactic, and morphological errors. A group of 30 students enrolled in first year of Bachillerato of a private high school located in the northern part of Ecuador took part of this qualitative and quantitative research. A pre-test and a post-test were used to measure students knowledge regarding semantic, syntactic and morphologic errors. Furthermore, a checklist was applied to provide feedback to the 6 different paragraphswhich were writtenby the participants. Finally, a survey was applied to know their perception about the efficacy of teachers feedback and students peer correction. Findings reveled that the most common errors belonged to the syntactics category (inappropriate use of comma and sentence fragments instead of complete sentences), followed bymorphological errors(omission of prepositions and omission of inflection).The study concludes that direct teacher feedback ismore effective than peer correction due to lack of students knowledge linguistic knowledge.