The impact of peer response group in enhancing writing skills at college level

Abstract EN

Writing is one of the most important skills in learning English as EFL since it allows writers to explore thoughts and ideas.

Peer response is a method used by some writing teachers to encourage revision and peer review activities provide students with opportunities to share ideas, provide feedback, negotiate meaning and collaborate to provide the final drafts.

The researcher has never observed teachers to use peer response groups in their classes, so the researcher was very interested in encouraging the use this technique to enhance writing skill at the college level.

The present study aims at developing students’ abilities to write through carrying out a training programme comprising the use of peer response in an EFL setting.

The duration of training is limited to four weeks with 50 minutes scheduled meeting per week adopting the guidelines which were presented by Elbow(1978).The population of the study consists of (20)students of the third grade (group-D) (males and females)for the academic year (2013-2014).Data collection instruments includes: Observation of the students’ on- task activities, off-task, and visible emotional indicators during the peer review session, Evaluation of original and final drafts of peer review activities and Questionnaire survey administered to the student participants to determine their perceived success of the peer review session which is measured by Likert scale..

The findings suggest that significant changes, especially in grammar and vocabulary, were obtained in comparing the first and the last draft written by the students.

They indicated that classmates' oral and written comments helped them to enrich the content of their writing, to improve the organization of their writing, and also to improve the language (including grammar and vocabulary) of their writing besides strengthening the social relationship with their peers and enjoying the lecture.