Exploring the Effects of Peer Review and Teachers' Corrective Feedback on EFL Students' Online Writing Performance

The purpose of this study was to compare the effects of the combination of teacher-led feedback and peer review (TF + PR) and a single TF method on the writing performance of English as a foreign language (EFL) university students within a collaborative online learning system. The students' perceptions of the writing course were also examined. An experimental PR + TF group and a comparison TF group, with a total of 107 undergraduate students majoring in nursing, participated in this study during the fall semester of 2011. The results revealed that the students in the TF + PR group demonstrated greater improvements than those who received only TF in terms of holistic writing skills and the subscales of content, organization, grammar, mechanics, and style. The PR perceptions of the TF + PR group learners and the manner in which they adopted strategies for coping with peer feedback are discussed.