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Top1. Introduction
Today, the role of the CMC to implement e-peer feedback in writing classrooms has become a focus for research. Applying e-peer response activities can empower students in the learning process and make writing classes more collaborative. Working in the technological environment allows students to take more active and autonomous roles when seeking feedback since they can ask questions whenever they wish and take the initiative in discussions (Warschauer et al., 1996). Student conferencing makes discussions more “student-centered”, fosters a sense of communication, encourages a sense of group knowledge, and increases student participation (Warschauer, 2002). Braine (1997), Sullivan and Pratt (1996) assert that putting students to work together in the technological environment can lead to better writing products and more focused quality peer response.
To some extent, literature has argued about students’ preferences and enhancing writing quality based on peer feedback. The first aspect of the debate relates to the preferences among students towards the e-peer responses. It is worth noting the students’ perceptions of e-peer response in order to get the most collaboration in the learning process as the methods that match particular students’ learning style or preferences often work best (Treglia, 2006). According to the “student-centered” approach, students are considered as the central subjects in the teaching/learning process. There should be a high level of agreement from both the instructor and the students to gain effective results in the learning. Pedagogically, when the classroom instructor obtains a high degree of agreement from his or her students, he or she will have a better chance of gaining the students’ collaboration in the classroom activities; successful of teaching will emerge from this. However, it is not an easy phenomenon to investigate. DiGiovanni and Nagaswami (2001) examined students’ responses in both electronic and traditional modes of peer review to see whether online peer review could become a viable option to the traditional peer review and found that students preferred face-to-face peer review to online peer review because students felt more comfortable to talk to their peers face to face rather than by computer. Similarly, Tuzi (2004) claimed that the students in the study preferred traditional peer response to e-peer response even though the e-peer response had a greater impact on revision than traditional peer response. Relating to writing quality, Sullivan and Pratt (1996), Pham and Usaha (2013), and Song and Usaha (2009) found that the writing quality did improve in the e-peer response mode from the first to the final drafts. However, Braine (1997), and Braine (2001) found the improvement of writing quality in the traditional classroom was higher than that of the e-peer response class. Furthermore, Matsumura and Hann (2004) found no significant difference in the degree of improvement between the online indirect response and face-to-face response. There should be qualitative investigation to see how the students themselves gauge their own improvement in the learning process. There have been so few studies conducted to explore students’ perceptions on the use of e-peer response to investigate whether the tool the instructors/researchers used is favorable to the students. The purposes of this paper are to investigate the students’ attitudes on the improvement of the quality of their writing as well as their attitudes toward e-peer feedback.