Exploring Student Engagement With Computer-Mediated Peer Feedback on L2 Writing

Introduction

Feedback is crucial to L2 students’ writing development. While the value of teacher feedback is widely acknowledged, increasing attention has been paid to peer feedback in L2 writing classrooms in the last three decades (Ma, 2010; M. Lee, 2015; Yu & I. Lee, 2016). For peer feedback to be beneficial, student writers need to know how to engage with it appropriately. Since “student engagement is a key factor in the success of writing development” (Zhang & Hyland, 2018, p.91), it is necessary to have a thorough understanding of student engagement with peer feedback, especially when computer-mediated peer feedback has been increasingly utilized in writing classrooms (Pham, 2021). Despite a small number of studies on student engagement with peer feedback (Fan & Xu, 2020; Yu et al., 2018), there is limited research on how students engage with computer-mediated peer feedback. To fill this gap, this study drew on sociocultural theory (Engeström, 2001; Leont’ev, 1978) and a multi-dimensional perspective (Ellis, 2010) to explore two purposefully chosen Chinese EFL students’ affective, cognitive, and behavioral engagement with asynchronous computer-meditated peer feedback in an academic writing course. Multiple sources of data were utilized, including student drafts, peer comments, think-aloud protocols, stimulated recall, and semi-structured interviews. This paper attempts to contribute to research on peer feedback by revealing the complex and contextualized processes through which learners engage with asynchronous computer-mediated peer feedback and shed light on pedagogical implications for facilitating learners’ engagement with such feedback to improve their writing.