International Journal of Instruction April 2022 ● Vol.15, No.

2
e-ISSN: 1308-1470 ● www.e-iji.net p-ISSN: 1694-609X
pp. 189-206
Article submission code: Received: 25/06/2021 Accepted: 20/10/2021
20210625071104 Revision: 26/09/2021 OnlineFirst: 21/01/2022

Effect of Peer Feedback on Paragraph Writing Performance among High

School Students

Nguyen Huynh Trang

Dr., University of economics Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam, [email protected]
Khau Hoang Anh
Corresponding author, Tra Vinh University, Vietnam, [email protected]

Writing is one of the four important skills in learning a foreign language.

However, most high school students find it uneasy to write due to many different
both objective and subjective reasons. Finding effective solutions to this problem
is always appreciated. This study, therefore, hopes to investigate whether peer
feedback has any positive effect on this group’s writing performance. In order to
support this investigation, the authors attempted to deploy a writing teaching
strategy using peer feedback as the main instrument to foster students’ ability to
write their paragraph. Two groups of the participants were recruited: 37 control
students and 39 experimental ones in a high school in a rural district in Vietnam.
After six weeks of intervention with this strategy, most students in the experimental
group were awarded a better score than their counterparts in the control groups in
general. The authors applied a 10 - scale rating rubric with three paragraph rating
domains to measure their paragraph writing performance. Then, the authors also
made an attempt to see the experimental students’ attitudes towards peer feedback
after their application in class and they were satisfied with it afterwards. It revealed
that overall they showed positive attitudes towards peer feedback.
Keywords: high school students, writing, peer feedback, writing performance, paragraph
writing domains, attitudes
INTRODUCTION
When applying peer feedback, the classroom teacher sees each individual’s work as a
process not a product and this process needs scaffolding by either their teacher or
classmates. When this view of peer-feedback is fostered, more advantages can be seen.
When working in pairs or groups, students feel more secured and therefore less tense.
Working with others helps more timid learners who seem to be less involved in the
whole class work to engage more in group discussion. Brown (2007) called peer-editing
a stage when learners share things together. This is done to see if they have been
successfully conveyed their intended meaning in their writing. This is the stage when
learners step out of the world of own selves and bring the product to other for

Citation: Trang, N. H., & Anh, K. H. (2022). Effect of peer feedback on paragraph writing
performance among high school students. International Journal of Instruction, 15(2), 189-206.
https://doi.org/10.29333/iji.2022.15211a
190 Effect of Peer Feedback on Paragraph Writing Performance …

assessment in the hope that they can make some improvement of their next writing draft.
He emphasized that peer editing is a two-way benefit activity when one gives the other
his or her feedback and in return one receives other’s comments on the writing draft.
Working with others helps individuals raise their awareness of team spirit and thus
bringing about class unity, which reflects what Heerden and Bharuthram (2021) found in
their study that when peers know each other well or fairly well, they feel comfortable
and enjoy working with each other and tend to have open discussion. Furthermore, the
foreign language classroom filled with group or pair discussion will help break the
monotonous atmosphere in which a font-teacher is talking all the time. Peer feedback
has been long said to facilitate teaching and learning, especially when the classroom
teacher is able to opitmize it in their classroom. According to Cassidy and Bailey
(2018), learners who involved in peer feedback were able to be more responsible for
their classmates’ writing work; they learned more about their partner’s content,
organization and various grammatical points. Furthermore, “Student self-assessment
most generally involves a wide variety of mechanisms and techniques through which
students describe (i.e., assess) and possibly assign merit or worth to (i.e., evaluate) the
qualities of their own learning processes and products” (Panadero et al., 2015, p.1). Peer
feedback can be provided in different forms as found in Kusumaningrum et al. (2019)
such as in-class peer feedback and small-group peer feedback provision forms which
share equal value of quality. Peer feedback can be also implemented via electronic
platforms instead of traditional peer feedback provision in classroom, which was found
in Pham, et al. (2020) when they discovered that both types enhanced students’ writing
performance albeit E-commentary type surpassing the other. As seen from these works,
peer feedback can be great of help in various situations and this, therefore, has driven
the researchers to try using peer feedback in their own classes in a high school in the
south of Vietnam. The aim of this investigation is to test if peer feedback continues to
shed rosy light in the classroom. To facilitate this aim, two objectives are expected to
reach. The first one is to test whether peer feedback assists high school students in
improving their writing performance. The second objective is to explore if these
students are satisfied with the application of peer feedback in class. The researchers in
this current study hope the following two research questions help gain the objectives.
1. Does the training of using peer feedback help improve tenth grade students’
paragraph writing performance?
2. What do they think about peer feedback providing in writing paragraphs?
Literature Review
Theoretical background
To form a framework for this current study, the researchers first use a paragraph
structure proposed by Savage & Shafiei (2012); it contains a topic sentence and
controlling idea. Mentioning things without specific information or explanation is not
persuasive, so the topic sentence must contain some supporting ideas and these
supporting ideas are included in the supporting sentences which all support a single idea
in the topic sentence. A paragraph would not be complete, if it did not have the

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concluding sentence which summarizes the idea in the topic sentence. Secondly, the
study applies the peer-editing idea described by Oshima and Hogue (2007); they
regarded peer editor “a classmate who reads your paper and helps you improve the
content and organization. A peer editor’s job is to read, ask questions, and comment on
what’s good and on what might be changed or made clearer” (pp. 18-19). Then, in order
to apply scores and ways of providing comments given during peer feedback, the study
also utilizes the idea of Peterson (2013). He said peer feedback on writing helps develop
students’ self-assessment abilities through providing opportunities to learn and apply
scoring criteria alongside helpful information to guide revisions for later improvement
of a student’s writing. This idea also mentioned the role of the classroom teacher and he
added that the teacher could do modelling and give examples to ensure effectiveness of
a feedback activity. Furthermore, Westwood (2008) advised the classroom teacher has
to provide appropriate modelling and demonstration so his or her students can mimic.
Finally, as this study provides the feedback training for the students, the researchers also
take the ideas of Yu & Lee (2016); Rollinson (2005); Westwood (2008) and Kroll
(2001) to guide the training. They said the classroom teacher needs to carefully design
the peer feedback procedure, provide students with sufficient training, and adjust the
training procedure according to their own teaching contexts. They also suggested using
peer feedback as to collaborate, to help make the next draft better than the previous and
therefore the classroom teacher should let the groups fairly free to write their own
feedback. In terms of providing feedback, feedback provider has to give constructive
comments which are specific. Regarding the training strategy, students themselves must
be more efficient in their approach to learning. Thus, the classroom teacher has to teach
students how to learn it.
Related studies
Elfiyanto and Fukazawa (2021) attempted to explore which type of feedback (peer
feedback, teacher feedback or self-feedback) was likely to affect 162 senior high school
students the most in two different schools in Indonesia and Japan and this number was
divided into three groups to receive three different sources of feedback. To see if any
improvement was seen, the authors conducted the pretest for the platform of comparison
with the posttest writing performance. The results showed that corrective feedback given
by peers improved Indonesian students’ writing performance while Japanese students
benefited most from their teacher’s corrective feedback.
Kusumaningrum, et al. (2019) employed two types of feedback (in-class peer feedback
and small group feedback) to see if 55 EFL students’ writing performance was enhanced.
It revealed that both types of feedback helped these students level up their writing ability.
However, the two types of peer feedback showed no significant difference in producing
an effective piece of writing. They concluded these types of feedback in this context
showed no disparity in empowering students’ writing.
Kuyyogsuy (2019) made an investigation of 21 third-year English majors in a university
writing class for approximately 11 weeks in Thailand. Their English was assumed to be
sufficient to provide feedback to their friends’ papers. She attempted to see if any effects

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that peer feedback brought about. She used the writing pretest and post test to test
students on mechanics, language use, vocabulary, organization and content. The applied
criteria were “very poor, fair to poor, good to average, and very good to excellent. They
were to write a narrative paragraph about “an interesting day the following summer” of
approximately 180-200 words in one and a haft hour with a dictionary in the exam.
Furthermore, they were provided with written reflection worksheets to reflect upon
using peer feedback. She also offered the participants the training sessions in the first
three weeks of the writing course. The peer feedback training was divided into three
stages: modelling, exploring and consciousness-raising. The result showed that students
made progress in their writing ability by reducing the mistakes on each kind of error.
Schunn and WU (2019) developed an idea of the Persuasive Zone of Competence
among different students with different levels of English proficiency and showed that
their feedback were persuasive and they were able to address the performance problems
among their peers. Their idea was also connected with Vygotsky’s theoretical construct
of the ZPD (Zone of Proximal Development), meaning “the difference between the
actual development level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of
potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance, or
in collaboration with more capable peers” (p. 15). Based on this finding, more capable
classmates can be of help if they are encouraged by their classroom teacher to assist
their weaker friends in writing.
Huisman et al. (2018) did a study on peer feedback on academic writing with 83
undergraduate students who had either the role of peer feedback receivers or peer
feedback providers about an authentic academic task. They were trained to look for
certain aspects like content, structure and style of an essay. These participants had to
either provide or receive peer feedback in the forms of analysis, evaluation, explanation
and revision. It revealed that their final essays, which was the revision of the first ones
experienced improvement. The form of explanatory peer comments was seen as the
most useful tool in giving feedback and most preferred by feedback receivers since these
comments could help better their papers in the revision process.
Yu and Hu (2017, p.186) found many interesting opinions of peer feedback in their
study as follows:
One student said: It’s always better to give than to receive. Reviewing others’ work can
help me reflect on my own writing and my ways of drafting English essays. I enjoyed
the reviewing process a lot as I could really learn from my classmates.
However, not all the participants agreed with this. One student said like this.
To be honest, I am not interested in peer feedback at all. I did this mainly because this
was a task required by the writing teacher. I don’t have any expectation. You know, it’s
quite difficult for students to provide really meaningful and useful comments and
suggestions. Most of the feedback focuses on grammar. From this result, the classroom
teacher should clearly set the goal for peer feedback activities. Some of the students in
the study did not show their preference in peer feedback as they did not what they
should comment on or they just cannot do so.

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In contrast to Yu and Hu (2017, p.186), Yu & Lee (2016) conducted a study on 41

students and found that low language proficiency students were able to give many
comments to their peers’ texts in terms of form, content, organization and others related
to their writing. Then the majority of them held respect for their friends’ comments and
led to draft revision afterward. Regarding factors contributing to the success of peer
feedback, many of low language proficiency students revealed that thanks to the use of
L1 (mother tongue), they could do the task well. Therefore, this study can be a good
suggestion for homogeneous students who speak the same first language and need to use
their mother tongue to discuss for improving their drafts. This finding can be seen as
evidence that low language proficiency can still give as many comments as they can if
they receive careful instruction from their teacher.
Moore and Teather (2013) conducted a study on engaging students in peer review:
feedback as learning. They found in their first survey about students’ prior experience
about peer review that “Students liked the opportunity to work collaboratively with
others, obtain different perspectives on their work; get new ideas from others, receive
constructive feedback, and work with people in a similar position to them” (p. 202).
However, many of them hated their work to be marked by their friends and nothing else
besides marks. Their result also disclosed that two thirds of the participants saw peer
review as a very useful activity and one third to be a fairly useful activity. They were
content that peer feedback is constructive. The students, furthermore, confessed that
they had a difficult time during giving peer feedback because they had to identify areas
needed improving, write comments, use their limited knowledge to judge and run with
time while attempting to find mistakes. For the second survey about students’ experience
about peer feedback in this unit, they found that all the participants found it very useful
or useful. The participants even worked harder than normal work both creating their
own work and giving feedback.
Wakabayashi (2013) made an investigation of 51 university writing students who were
recruited to either review their own texts or review their peers’ texts. Better students
were assigned to review their own texts while lower English proficiency students
reviewed peers’ texts. Both groups were provided with the reviewing worksheet to give
detailed feedback on texts. The results showed that reviewing their own texts have better
scores than those reviewing their peers’ texts. However, according to the questionnaire
survey, the majority of students in this study prefer to have a standard type feedback
where they can exchange comments, especially in the written form.
Lin & Chien (2009) conducted a study on “An Investigation into Effectiveness of Peer
Feedback”. The participants in their study recruited sixteen English-majored students
who volunteered in the survey. The treatment lasted for six weeks which were divided
into four sessions. In the first two weeks, the participants were trained on how to
develop a number of writing strategies and skills. In the second session, they were
guided to do an exercise on writing about the assigned topic related to their course.
Simultaneously, they had a chance to look at their peers’ paper and made corrections for
them in both their mother tongue and in English. After their completion on giving
comments on these papers, the raters (two of them) also took back these papers and gave

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comments and grades on such papers. The first finding is that the majority of the
participants could experience a more relaxing, confident and inspiring atmosphere.
However, this study is similar to Miao et al. (2006) in that many of them seemed to be
suspicious about their friends’ corrections while they still saw their teacher’s corrections
were more reliable. Furthermore, the participants’ perceptions brought themselves more
insights and directions of writing in according to their peers’ cognitive interaction of
ideas. The participants in the study are willing to take part in giving and receiving each
other’s feedback.
In Lizzio & Wilson (2008)’s study, they investigated a group of 57 psychology, law and
arts students on the three research questions. (1) What do students perceive as the
characteristics or components of effective feedback on written assessment? (2) What is
the underlying structure of students’ perceptions of assessment feedback? (3) How do
identified feedback components relate to students’ evaluations of the effectiveness of
assessment feedback? They investigated on the the domain of criteria such as
encouragement (recognizing effort, acknowledging achievements, considerate criticism
and giving hope), depthful criticism (depthful feedback), development focus
(transferability, identifying goals, suggesting strategies, engaging content) and justice
(justification of mark, transparency, opportunity for voice and clarity). They found the
participants’ perceptions of assessment feedback can be meaningfully understood in the
three dimensions: developmental, encouraging and fair feedback. Then, students
themselves can tell the quality of feedback providing.
Another effective peer feedback was conducted by Miao et al. (2006), who attempted to
compare the feedback given by their classmates with that given by their classroom
teacher. They discovered that the participants tended to believe more in their teacher’s
feedback than that provided by their friends through the analysis of the responses in the
questionnaire and the paper quality. Nonetheless, peer feedback still played the role in
enhancing these students’ writing. Specifically, their results showed that teacher
feedback class accounted for 3.59 (first draft), 4.46 (second draft) while peer feedback
class constituted 4.08 (first draft) and 4.50 (second draft). Regarding the questionnaire,
both groups posited that either teacher feedback or peer feedback are useful or very
useful. For the eastern classroom culture, students venerate their teacher’s knowledge
and guidance. The result from this study gives us a good side of peer feedback.
In a study conducted by Liu & Carless (2006), peer feedback is also recommended in
the classroom. However, it has to be implemented in some ways to facilitate this kind of
feedback. They suggested using peer feedback integrated with peer assessment,
strategies to involve students in peer feedback activities and creating a climate for peer
feedback to happen. To motivate students to give and receive feedback positively, the
classroom teacher should focus on the usefulness of peer feedback instead of prioritizing
marks given to each other’s work. A good strategy must assist students in understanding
the criteria for assessing each other’s work. When students can actually know what to
look for in a task, they will become better assessors and learners later on. They also
added that peer feedback activities should be carried out often in class.

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Nelson (2004) conducted a thesis on “The Nature of Feedback: How Different of Peer
Feedback Affect Writing Performance”. He found in his study that to let the feedback to
be valued by their peers, the feedback provider must be able to give concrete comments
on his or her classmate’s paper. He found that vague comments made their classmates
unhappy and feedback receivers did not know what to do with those unclear comments.
He also made some suggestions on how to give valuable comments. For example, what
was the problem? Why was it a problem? Or show them what to do to improve the
writing. What is more, he also found that feedback providers must be able to show
useful comments on their peers’ paper. The feedback providers were to give feedback to
their friends for the writing improvement purpose, not targeting the punishment on their
peers for their mistakes. Instead, feedback providers have to give specific explanation to
improve each particular issue in the writing.
Berg (1999) investigated effects of trained peer response ESL students’ revision types
and writing quality on 46 writing students who received training on peer feedback. The
findings revealed that all of the trainees showed writing improvement of the second draft
after the revision of their first draft. They also found that trained students made revisions
more meaning (more meaning-type revisions and text quality) than untrained ones.
However, to make it easier, students’ papers applied a holistic scale of rating writing and
were read blindly by the two trained raters whose results were then averaged. This
finding suggests that the instructor ought to train their students to take part in peer
feedback activities to better their own papers and their friends’ papers.
METHOD
Participants
The study recruited two groups of the tenth grade students at a high school in a rural
district in Vietnam. The control group has 37 students and the experimental group
consists of 39 students. Many of the students come from disadvantaged families because
their parents work as farmers or vendors or sellers in the market, so their living
situations and lifestyle are quite different from those in more advantageous big cities.
They all are 16 years old and they are monolingual students and speak English as a
foreign language. They started learning English when they were at grade 3. Before they
came to the second semester of the academic school year, they had already been familiar
with some reading texts like paragraph and essay styles that require them to use some
source of writing to answer the questions or guided questions after reading the texts such
as giving short answers to the questions. However, they had not written their own
paragraph.
Materials
English 10 - Student book: Volume 2, a new version published in 2019 used in mass
education in all high schools in Vietnam (Publisher: Bộ giáo dục và đào tạo) was used
as the main source to provide the outline of a basic paragraph. The textbook consists of
five units and each has a writing section at the final part of the unit. The outline of each
unit is the same through the display of the textbook. Since all the paragraph topics in
the textbooks are about general ideas, the authors spent approximately one period of the

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class time reviewing the use of the simple present tense for both groups in the textbook.
However, for the experimental group, a peer-editing worksheet was also delivered to
students for giving comments on each other’s work. The worksheet was adapted from
that of Oshima and Hogue (2007), who designed many useful worksheets for providing
feedback to their classmates’ paragraphs and essays. Then, the authors selected a
familiar topic about disadvantages of living in the countryside for the participants to
write in the pre-test and posttest. This topic was as the same form as what they had
practiced in class. The purpose of using this familiar topic is that the authors wanted to
allow the students in both groups to write as many ideas as possible. If they could not
write much, there would be nothing to evaluate.
Instruments
The study utilized two instruments to collect the data. The first instrument is using the
participants’ paragraphs at the pre-test and posttest to see their paragraph writing
performance. Before delivering the pre-test, test-retest reliability was used to check the
reliability of the test; the time between the two intervals was 3 days, the test conditions
between the two times were the same. Then, the correlation coefficient (r) of the content
of the test was calculated and the results are presented in Table 1 below.
Table 1
Reliability of the writing test
No 1st time 2nd time
group r Sig.

1 Experimental group 4.65  1.06 4.68  1.08 0.991 0.00

4.78  0.98 4.80  1.02

2 Control group 0.954 0.00

The results from Table 1 indicated that the writing test was reliable with r >0.95 and sig.
<0.01). The figures indicated that the test could be used as the first instrument. What is
more, to measure their paragraph performance, the authors designed a 10-scale
paragraph scoring rubric containing three main domains: Domain 1 (worth 3 points) is
looking for Task-Achievement (e.g. Your paragraph is interesting/addresses the task
question). Domain 2 (worth 3 points) in the rubric is about Language use (e.g. Your
paragraph has correct use of the simple present tense/ uses correct spellings/ uses correct
punctuation and capitalization). Domain 3 (worth 4 points) is looking for the
Organization of the paragraph (e.g. Your paragraph has the first indented sentence/ a
topic sentence that has both a topic and a controlling idea at the first sentence/ contains
several specific and factual supporting sentences that explain or prove the topic
sentence, including at least one example/ ends with an appropriate concluding sentence).
To obtain more information about the experimental group students, the authors also used
the other tool to collect the participants’ opinions on peer feedback providing. That is
using the questionnaire which aims to elicit responses from the participants in the
experimental group. The questionnaire consists of one part only. It has six
items/questions which attempts to elicit participants’ perspectives on peer feedback
providing. Their responses were prompted to be given in the box that best describes

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them with the numbers from 1 to 5 according to a five-point Likert Scale, from 1:
strongly disagree, 2: disagree, 3: neutral, 4: agree and to 5: strongly agree. To see if the
questions in the questionnaire were reliable enough to use, the authors test the reliability
and it reached .831, meaning that it is reliable enough to use in the study as described in
Table 2 below.
Table 2
Reliability statistics of the questionnaire about peer feedback providing
Cronbach's Alpha N of Items
.831 6
Procedure
The intervention comprised six class sessions and each writing class lasted for 45
minutes. These class sessions took place once a week in a period of one and a half
month. At the first meeting, the instructor started with Unit 6 and the writing topic in
this unit is about the disadvantages of working mothers. The instructor taught students
how to construct a paragraph based on the content in the student’s textbook. Once the
students in both groups knew a clear picture of a paragraph and scoring criteria, he had
them write a paragraph about disadvantages of working mothers for the pretest. Both
groups had 20 minutes to write about it, and then their papers were collected for further
analysis in the next class meeting. In the second meeting, students’ papers were returned
to them plus the teacher’s feedback. The teacher reminded the whole class in two groups
of some common errors they made in their papers and showed them the corrections,
especially errors on the paragraph structure and the use of the simple present tense.
After that, the classroom teacher collected the papers to compare with their posttest
paragraphs. Before doing this, the classroom teacher seated the students in a
comfortable place, at a safe distance where they could not exchange their ideas about the
paragraph, or they could not cheat to use a dictionary or textbook to write their
paragraph. At the third meeting, both the control group and experimental groups
approached their paragraph writing as planned in the textbook. This time, they were to
write a paragraph about some typical characteristics of Vietnamese people in Unit 7 in
the textbook. Especially, while the control group students were sticking to the textbook
only, the students in the experimental group received a different teaching method called
using ‘peer feedback’ to help with their paragraph writing. Both groups during a period
of six weeks receiving instruction on paragraph writing were asked to use a rubric
introduced at the first meeting and then were trained how to use it to guide their writing;
however, only the experimental students were instructed how to use a peer-editing
worksheet to evaluate their classmates’ paragraph papers later. Another difference
between the two groups is the source of feedback. While the students in the control
counterparts had their papers corrected by their teacher (but just some papers were
corrected as a whole class due to time constraint), the students’ papers in the
experimental group received feedback by their friends.. In the fourth class meeting, both
groups wrote a paragraph about the advantages of electronic devices as learning tools in
Unit 8. The process of both groups took place as that in the third class meeting. Then, in
the fifth meeting, the students in both groups wrote a paragraph about environmental

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problems. The process applied for both groups was similar to that in the third and fourth
meeting. However, the students in the experimental group were asked to rewrite their
paragraph at home after receiving every feedback from their classmates. Then, they
brought their revised paper to the next class meeting to hand it to the teacher, including
their friends’ feedback which was checked by the teacher who would give feedback on
these students’ comments on their friends’ papers. Finally, again, in the sixth writing
class meeting, the experimental group was told about the result of peer feedback and
their improvement on their revised paragraphs. For the students in the control group,
they were encouraged to write their paragraph as instructed based on what was displayed
in the textbook. Then, both groups were told to take their post-test paragraph writing.
They were asked to write the same type of paragraph in the pre-test (disadvantages of
…). This post test, they spent 20 minutes completing the writing task: disadvantages of
living in the countryside compared to disadvantages of a working mother in the pretest.
Then when the time allowance ended, the classroom teacher asked the participants to put
their pen down and leave the paper on the table for collection. Finally, their papers were
collected for analysis and comparison with their pre-test papers.
Data Collection and Analysis
For the pre-test, all 37 papers in the control group and 39 papers in the experimental
group were collected for analysis of their paragraph performance. Three comparisons
were employed: (1) The pretest result of control group was compared with that of the
experimental group. (2) The post-test result of the control group was compared with that
of the experimental group. (3) The pretest result of experimental group was compared
with the post-test result of the experimental group. All the comparisons were conducted
by using independent samples T-test and Paired Samples t-Test. After that, the analysis
of the students’ perspectives on peer feedback providing was done with the assistance of
the SPSS. The process of analysis took the authors approximately 8 hours to finish
computing, not including grading the students’ test papers.
FINDINGS
Students’ Writing Tests
Table 3 below describes the results of an independent samples T- test which was
conducted to compare the experimental and control mean scores of the pre-test and the
post-test before and after the experiment.

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Table 3
Results of both groups in paragraph writing performance before and after the experiment
Mean
Test Group N Mean Std. Deviation t-value Sig
difference
Experimental Group 39 4.65 1.06
Pre-test 0.13 0.55 0.58
Control Group 37 4.78 0.98
Experimental Group 39 6.41 0.80
Post test 1.34 6.86 0.00
Control Group 37 5.07 0.89
As can be seen in Table 3, the pre-test scores for the experimental group is (M= 4.65,
SD= 1.06), which is very slightly different from the control group, accounting for (M=
4.7, SD= 0.98). However, there is no significant difference between the two groups
(sig= 0.58 > 0.05). This is a good sign to start with as it is not reliable if the participants’
English proficiency in writing in the both groups is much different.
After the treatment, a significant difference was seen in the post test scores of the two
groups (sig = 0.00 < 0.05). While the scores for the experimental group was (M= 6.41,
SD = 0.80), the control group made up higher value (M= 5.07, SD = 0.89).
To see the improvement of the participants within each group after the treatment, a
Paired samples T-test was conducted. The data are shown in Table 4 below.
Table 4
Paired samples T- test results for both tests within the experimental group and the
control group
N Mean Std. Deviation t-value Sig
Experimental Pre-test 39 4.65 1.06
13.75 0.00
Group Post test 39 6.41 0.80
Pre-test 37 4.78 0.98
Control Group 2.01 0.06
Post test 37 5.07 0.89
Table 4 is used to describe the scores of the same group and it was employed to
compare their pre-test scores and post test scores. The results showed that the
participants in the experimental group produced greater marks for their post-test
paragraph writing with (M= 6.41) while their pre-test showed (M = 4.65). It shows a
significant difference between the two test scores in the experimental group (sig=0.00 <
0.05). Meanwhile the control group mean scores were observed and found a slight
difference, but this difference has no statistical meaning (sig=0.06> 0.05).
The results of the experimental group pose significant difference after the treatment, so a
Paired Sample T-test was conducted to see the improvement of each scoring criterion.
The data are presented in Table 5 below.

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Table 5
Paired samples T- test data for scoring criteria of the experimental group
N Mean Std. Deviation t-value Sig
Scoring criterion 1: Pre-test 39 1.38 0.51
5.43 0.00
Task Achievement Post test 39 1.79 0.40
Scoring criterion 2: Pre-test 39 1.44 0.56
8.46 0.00
Language Post test 39 2.01 0.40
Scoring criterion 3: Pre-test 39 1.83 0.50
9.93 0.00
Organization Post test 39 2.63 0.40
The results showed that the participants in the experimental group produced greater
marks for their post-test paragraph writing in Task Achievement with (M= 1.79) while
their pre-test scores showed (M = 1.38). For Language criterion, it was seen that the
participants in the experimental group had better marks in their post-test (M= 2.01)
compared with their pre-test (M = 1.44). For the last criterion, organization, the results
showed that the participants in the experimental group produced greater marks for their
post-test paragraph writing in the Organization domain with (M= 2.63) while their pre-
test scores showed (M = 1.83). It can be concluded that all the three values of the post-
test after the experiment surpassed the figures of the pre-test.
Questionnaire
This part of the findings is about the questionnaire which was delivered to 39 student
participants for their opinion on their ability to write a paragraph in English after
receiving feedback from their classmates. One-sample statistics was employed to show
the mean score of their opinion on peer feedback providing with the mean score of 3.99
as seen in Table 6 below.
Table 6
Descriptive sstatistics for the six items in the questionnaire about the use of peer
feedback
N Min Max Mean Std.
Dev
It helps me improve my paragraph writing in general. 39 1.00 5.00 4.00 .92
It helps me improve topic development. 39 2.00 5.00 3.85 .78
It helps me improve ability to write supporting ideas. 39 1.00 5.00 3.79 .86
It helps me improve my ability to give more details. 39 2.00 5.00 3.82 .72
It helps me improve my ability to write the concluding
39 1.00 5.00 4.26 .79
sentence.
It helps my ability to use the simple present tense in writing
39 2.00 5.00 4.20 .80
paragraphs with the main use of this tense.
Overall 3.99 .20
In particular, as can be seen in Table 6, the majority of the students showed their
agreement in peer feedback providing. At the first glance, the mean scores for most
questions reached nearly or above 4 (agree).

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Trang & Anh 201

DISCUSSION
Tests
As apparently seen in all the tables of comparing the students’ writing tests, the
experimental group benefited the use of peer feedback providing activities in the
classroom. Prior to the treatment, the experimental group did not exceed their
counterparts in the control group in terms of scores awarded. A 10- scale scoring rubric
of a paragraph was employed and it has three language domains to be rated: Task
achievement (3 points), language use (3 points) and paragraph organization (4 points).
As seen in Table 3, the mean score of the experimental group was 4.65 and that of the
control group was 4.78, so they could be seen almost the same (sig = 0.58>0.05). When
comparing post-test results, it is obvious that the score of the experimental group
outreached that of the control group, with the mean scores = 6.41 and 5.07, respectively.
When looking closer at each grading domain as depicted in Table 5, the experimental
group performed better in their post-test. Their outcomes for paragraph writing domains
have improved compared to those at their placement (Task achievement: pre-test M=
1.38, post-test M= 1.79 per 3 points; Language pre-test M= 1.44, post-test M= 2.01 per
3 points and Organization pre-test M= 1.83, post-test M= 2.63 per 4 points). The
significant difference of the scores awarded in task achievement, language and
organization shows quite large between the two intervals (sig = 0.00).
This present result is aligned with Kuyyogsuy (2019), whose study showed a positive
result after the intervention of using peer feedback in writing and it is that his students
had fewer mistakes of language use in writing. In addition, the current result reflects the
study by Uymaz (2019), who found a more improvement of the post-test essays of the
participants after the introduction of peer feedback. Then, the current finding also
accords the study conducted by Huisman et al. (2018), whose work used peer feedback
to affect academic writing and they found these participants could write better after
revision. This result also reflects that of Elfiyanto and Fukazawa (2021), who found
feedback helped make Indonesian students improve their writing.
Berg (1999)’s findings revealed that the trainees who provided and received peer
feedback were able to write better at the second draft than in the first draft. Finally,
Huisman et al. (2018) also studied the effects of feedback on students’ essay revisions
among 83 undergraduate students and the results showed that many of them could take
advantage of this peer feedback activity to sharpen their essays at the later draft. These
two studies are in line with the current study in that their ultimate paper was much
improved after receiving comments from peers.
In short, through these current studies and many of the previous studies, it can be
concluded that to be able to write better, many writing students experienced peer
feedback, receiving the training of peer feedback and exchanging their opinions on their
first draft before sharpening the second one.

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202 Effect of Peer Feedback on Paragraph Writing Performance …

Questionnaire
Looking closely at the six questions in Table 4.12, positive responses were given by the
majority of the participants. This is in general a quite positive sign to apply peer
feedback providing though not all the responses to the items in the questionnaire
obtained level 4 (agree) or 5 (strongly agree) on a five-point Likert scale. The first item
in the questionnaire obtained a mean score of 4.00. Therefore, these peer feedback
activities should be encouraged in the writing class so that both the classroom teacher
and his or students can both take advantage of it. Feedback helps the classroom teacher
reduce their burden on teaching, and at the same time it gives learners an opportunity to
work together to exchange useful ideas. Item 2 in the questionnaire received the mean
score of 3.85, demonstrating positive responses. Although it did not reach 4 (agree), the
total response almost reached it and this hinted us that the students can work better at
developing the topic sentence after the training of using peer feedback activities in their
writing class. Evidently, it is not easy to develop a topic for a paragraph. When looking
at some paragraph writing samples of the pre-test. Then, in the sentences below the topic
sentence, some students did not mention things that are advantageous to living in the
countryside. But then, in the post test, many of them could focus on only one aspect of
the issue as requested in the instruction and wrote about it through the paragraph. Item 3
in the questionnaire obtained a slightly low result, M = 3.79. This mean score did not
obtain 4 (agree), but it still indicated that the mean passed 3 (neutral idea) and at least
close to 4. Interestingly, their responses to this question accords with what the majority
of the participants did in their pre-test and post-test. Item 4 in the question received a
mean score of 3.82. This result was almost similar to that given to Item 2. In comparing
their pre-test and post test samples, they did write more at the post test. Many could give
more ideas in their paragraph although some ideas were not related to the given topic.
Item 5 obtained a mean score of 4.26. This is a positive response because the majority
of the experimental students (when referring to the pre-test and post-test analytical
results) did not write a persuasive or forgot to write the concluding sentence for their
paragraph at the pre-test, but most of them confessed in the survey they remembered the
structure of a paragraph as provided by Savage & Shafiei (2012). The last item achieved
M= 4.20, which suggests students can learn more about the simple present tense.
This result is aligned with Yu and Hu (2017, p.186), who found many interesting
positive opinions of peer feedback in their study as quoted in Section 2: Literature
review above. The majority of the participants in their study showed their positive
attitude toward peer feedback providing and only a few chose not to engage in such
activities in the future. Moore and Teather (2013) also discovered that two thirds of the
participants agreed that peer review is a very useful activity. The majority of students in
the study carried out by Wakabayashi (2013) prefer a standard type feedback to
exchange comments in writing. The current results also accord with the participants’
opinion on peer feedback providing conducted by Lin & Chien (2009) when they
attempted to discover these participants about the usefulness of peer feedback. The
current findings are also in line with that by Lizzio & Wilson (2008) when they aimed to
discover how the participants in their study perceived peer feedback activities. The
majority said that peer feedback can be meaningfully understood. This opinion on peer

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Trang & Anh 203

feedback providing assembles many of the findings found previously, showing a

positive attitude toward peer feedback activities.
CONCLUSION
The study discovered that peer feedback is useful in the writing class and this continues
to prove that peer feedback can be used in the classroom. The control group, after six
weeks of treatment, were able to write their paragraph better in terms of task
achievement, language use and paragraph organization. They also showed their
satisfaction about the usefulness of peer feedback activities. The experimental group
benefiting from the train of using peer feedback worksheet and scoring rubric could
produce better drafts after the training time of using feedback in their writing class.
Their post test result also outweighed that of the control group and their own pretest
results. In order to measure the students’ writing performance in both groups, the
authors used a paragraph scoring rubric which consists of three main domains. The first
domain was about task-Achievement. The second domain is about the language use in
the paragraph. The final domain is about the organization of the paragraph. For the
experimental group, the scores of each domain in the post test outwent those of each
domain in the pretest. For the control group, they also had a better result than that of
their pretest one; however, this did not surpass the post test result of the experimental
students. What is more, the second part of the study is the use of the questionnaire. The
study also looked at the experimental students’ opinions on peer feedback providing and
they also showed positive attitudes toward this activity in their writing class, which
accords with their post test results.
Some implications below should be brought into consideration. First, peer feedback can
be used in many levels of classes. In this current study, the participants are high school
students and they were able to acquire the method of giving each other’s feedback quite
well, so other teachers may find this use of peer feedback useful in their own classroom,
too. However, it is noteworthy that to optimize the idea of providing feedback, the
classroom teacher has to plan the process neatly and carefully starting from their first
class like what Lin & Chien (2009) mentioned in their study when the participants’ hard
work on applying peer feedback strategies paid off. One more implication of this study
is that the classroom teacher has to be patient and meticulous in doing modeling in front
of class and in providing examples of what is acceptable and what is not so their
students can learn and imitate critically later on. This point had already been made clear
in Moore and Teather (2013) about giving constructive feedback, Wakabayashi (2013)
about detailed feedback on texts and Lin & Chien (2009) about a relaxing, confident and
inspiring atmosphere for peer feedback. The third implication is that it is the classroom
teacher who has to ensure that they have paired or grouped students appropriately prior
to giving peer feedback. This is done to eliminate sceptics as once one feels sceptical
one finds it hard to accept things. It reflects what Miao et al. (2006) included in their
research when they found that peers tended to trust their classmates lesser than their
teachers in regard to knowledge. For future research, they may want to investigate how
male and male students give feedback to each other and how female and female students
provide each other with feedback. This will possibly produce a different result between

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204 Effect of Peer Feedback on Paragraph Writing Performance …

the two groups. One more investigation can be made in the future is that can students
train their peers on how to give feedback to their classmates as many previous studies
tended to focus greatly on the effect of peer feedback on the ultimate text-writing
performance, not on what they can present orally in front of class?
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This research is funded by University of Economics Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam and
Tra Vinh University, Vietnam.
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