The Effect of NS Secondary School Students Peer Feedback (Through E-mail Exchanges) on NNS Students Writing: A Sociocultural Perspective

Iranian EFL secondary school students were paired with American native student peers through Internet in a classroom writing project. The study is theoretically supported by process approach, sociocultural theory, andcomputer-mediated-communication, and investigates (a) the strategies employed by native speaker (NS)students to scaffold non-native speaker (NNS) key pals’ writings; (b) the degree to which the NNSs used thefeedback provided by their NS key pals; and (c) the degree to which the NNS students writing improved due to the feedback they received from their NS peers. The analysis of 12-week email correspondence between thetwo groups and evaluation of EFL students’ writings indicated 1) giving explicit feedback was the mostprominent type of scaffolding strategy used by the NS students, 2) the majority (77.9%) of the revisions madeby NNS students were surface revisions, and 3) the NNS students’ final (revised) drafts improved compared to their first drafts

کلیدواژه ها:

EFL writing ، peer review ، process writing ، sociocultural theory ، computer-mediated-communication (CMC)