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Graduate students’ self-reported perspectives regarding peer feedback and feedback from writing consultants

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Abstract

This study reported how ten Taiwanese Master’s students perceived their experiences of receiving feedback given by their peers and writing consultants to revise a shortened version of their thesis proposals. Collected over the course of one semester, data included students’ writing portfolios and interviews with them. Analysis of the data revealed three major themes: (1) The participants felt quite positive about providing and receiving peer feedback, although they seemed cautious toward language-related peer comments; (2) they generally had positive experience with the writing consultants, although the perceived usefulness of the consultants’ feedback varied with individual consultants and (3) the two types of comments served different functions for students, and questions arose from the peer editing process could serve as prompts for writing consultation sessions. Possible future research directions as well as pedagogical implication are outlined to conclude the paper.

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Notes

  1. The writing consultants are Ms. Kensington, Ms. Davidson, Mr. Smith, Ms. Lin, Ms. Chen, Ms. Cheng, Ms. Su, and Ms. Chang. The first three teachers are native speakers of English.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the National Science Council of Taiwan for sponsoring this study (NSC-98-2410-H-009-002). My gratitude also goes to the reviewers and editor, my research assistant Jay Peng, and my participants.

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Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Cheryl Wei-yu Chen.

Appendices

Appendix 1

See Table 1.

Table 1 Writing feedback sheet from the writing center

Appendix 2: Peer feedback sheet

  1. 1.

    What are the main strengths of this paper?

  2. 2.

    Are there consistent grammatical errors and stylistic problems? Please list them.

  3. 3.

    What is unclear to you in the paper? In your opinion, what should be changed, deleted, added, or restated? Please offer concrete suggestions.

  4. 4.

    What most impressed you about the paper?

  5. 5.

    Other comments on helping your peer improve his/her draft

Appendix 3

See Table 2.

Table 2 Revision feedback sheet (adopted from Liu and Hansen 2002)

Appendix 4

See Table 3.

Table 3 Mandy’s revision feedback sheet

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Chen, C.Wy. Graduate students’ self-reported perspectives regarding peer feedback and feedback from writing consultants. Asia Pacific Educ. Rev. 11, 151–158 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12564-010-9081-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12564-010-9081-5

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