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

Abstract

Abstract: This study examined the differences between peer correction and teacher feedback, as well as their effectiveness in improving morphological, semantic, and syntactic errors in EFL writing. The participants were ten second-year high school students with a basic command of the English language who attended a public educational institution in a rural zone of the canton Pichincha, in the province of Manabí province. To carry out the research, a mixed approach was employed to examine both qualitative and quantitative aspects. The main instruments applied to analyze the data consisted of a pre-test and post-test, six students written paragraphs, and a survey. The latter allowed to know the perceptionsof students. To grade the paragraphs, a rubric which contained semantic, syntactic, morphological, and mechanics criteria was employed. Furthermore, a checklist was used to examine the effectiveness of peer review. After analyzing the data, it was concluded that teacher feedback helped significantly to improve the writing abilities of students compared to peer review since a decrease in the number of morphological, semantic, and syntactic errors was observed at the end of the research.