Mohammad Rahimi

Is training student reviewers worth its while? A study of how training influences the quality of students’ feedback and writing

Vygotsky-inspired sociocultural theory (Vygotsky, 1962) indicates that human learning is mainly a social and cultural process that occurs through meaningful negotiation and interaction (scaffolding) between learners. The present study investigates whether training student reviewers can help them provide stronger scaffolding for their peers through providing feedback of a higher quality than those who do not undergo such training. In other words, this study investigates the effect of training student reviewers on the quality of their feedback and the effect of their comments on the quality of the revisions as well as their writing in the long run. To this end, two groups of Iranian English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners (n = 56) were randomly assigned to a trained group and an untrained group. The students in the trained group participated in two training sessions as well as student–teacher conferences, where they learned how to review a paragraph and provide effective feedback on it. The two groups then proceeded to review their peers’ writing. The results suggested that the trained students shifted attention from mere focus on formal aspects of writing to global comments (comments on the content and organization of writing) after training, while the feedback provided by untrained students mainly addressed formal errors. The results also indicated that the trained group made significant improvement in their writing in the long run and wrote paragraphs of a much higher quality as compared to the untrained group.

The Effect of Strategies-Based Instruction on the Improvement of EFL Learners’ Writing Quality

The present study draws primarily on Vygotsky’s (1978) sociocultural approach and sets out to explore the effect of instruction of sociocultural writing strategies on the improvement of EFL learners’ quality of writing. The study was conducted with two EFL writing classes randomly assigned to an experimental (N = 22) and a control group (N = 21) during a university term. Although the students in both classes worked in groups while practicing writing, only the experimental group was continuously taught to mediate their writings through different strategies and contextual mediations based on Engstrom’s (1987) activity theory. The students’ individual writing scores at the beginning and at the end of the experiment were compared, and the results convincingly proved that the experimental group made significantly more improvement in their writing ability than did the control group. The analysis of the recorded students’ interactions in both groups revealed that the experimental group used almost all the sociocultural strategies while practicing writing, whereas the control group made a very limited use of only some of these strategies.