Peer Feedback in Business Email Writing Classes for EFL College Students

The study investigated effects of peer feedback used in business email writing classes for EFL college students. To this end, the 18 students were asked to fill out a questionnaire on feedback two times before and after the course and six students from three different English proficiency levels were interviewed to take a close look at what was happening in classes. The findings demonstrated they generally had positive perception on peer feedback, but providing and receiving feedback itself made no significant differences in perception of peer feedback. However, the results could imply that students’ perception was moving from teacher feedback toward peer feedback. With regard to types of feedback, feedback on the content was getting more frequent with students experiencing peer feedback whereas the students provided feedback about surface-level features in the first writing task, ‘introduction’ task. In revising the text, the numbers of the revision were almost same in each writing task, but the types of revision varied from task to task. In ‘introduction’ task, deletion was the most common, but in ‘invitation’ and ‘complaints’ tasks they used adding and rearranging types more to express the exact meaning.