میترا ربیعی

The teaching of writing has recently begun to move away from a concentration on the written product to an emphasis on the process of writing. Feedback is a fundamental element of the process approach to writing. It can be defined as input from a reader to a writer with the effect of providing information to the writer for a revision. This study reports on the effectiveness of two types of feedback provided by two different sources– the teacher and the peers– on students’ overall writing quality in an EFL context. To fulfill such an aim, a group of 60 Iranian Persian native speakers aged between 22 and 25 majoring in English Translation were chosen from among a greater population of 98. They were assigned to three homogeneous groups based on their scores on Oxford Placement Test (OPT) and a sample writing assignment on a given topic by emphasizing the expository genre through providing some reasons. They covered five topics before and after receiving feedback– ten written texts– in the span of a 15-week semester. Then, the papers were rated analytically. The findings revealed that feedback had a noticeable effect on the students’ draft editing, and of the two sources of feedback, the students benefited from teacher’s feedback more than their peers’ feedback. Other possible implications interpreted from this study supported the occurrence of a change in students’ roles in communicative foreign language learning settings and that, they could take the role of autonomous learners and turn into common respondents to other students’ writings and in this way their L2 knowledge construction and implementation increased

Research in L1 writing has found numerous benefits of employing collaborative learning in the classroom. The research findings on group work provide clear evidence that engaging learners in group activities increases opportunities for students to engage in the negotiation of meaning, which further leads to better acquisition. The present study, implementing two different collaborative feedback models, based on various sources and modes of feedback, examines the effect of each on the students’ writing quality. Sixty Iranian students, majoring in English Translation, were assigned into three homogeneous groups based on their obtained scores on Oxford Placement Test (OPT) and sample paragraph writing. They covered five topics in a sequence of ten written texts − before and after receiving feedback − over a 15-week semester. The results revealed that students incorporated both the teacher’s and peers’ oral/written comments in the process of draft editing, and that they benefited from the two collaborative feedback models almost equally. The interview results also confirmed co-operative learning as an effective teaching strategy that could be used to enhance achievement and socialization among students and to improve attitudes towards learning and working in groups, especially in EFL settings.