STEVEN CHARLES (NAGOYA UNIVERSITY OF FOREIGN STUDIES)

STUDENTS’ PERCEPTIONS OF PEER REVIEW AND SELF-ASSESSMENT IN EFL WRITING : LANGUAGE TESTING AND ASSESSMENT

While conducting peer review and self-assessment sessions in writing classes, teachers assume that these activities are beneficial to the L2 writing student. Teachers may also take it for granted that students will understand the value and purpose in these student-centered activities. Students’ perceptions of these activities are not always taken into consideration by teachers. This project tracks a first-year writing class at a university in Japan over the course of a fifteen-week term. This intensive writing class, with tri-weekly lessons, includes five one-paragraph writing assignments and two written tests. As the students were executing these tasks, they answered an online questionnaire five times to gauge their opinions of peer review and self-assessment. The mixed method questionnaire consisted of a combination of a Likert scale statements and sentence completion items in order to record and evaluate students’ reflections on the two evaluation techniques. The general pattern that was observed indicated that students recognized the value of student-centered evaluation, even while some expressed opinions on the difficulty of these tasks. The overall positive perceptions of the students observed in this project indicate that student-centered evaluation is a constructive part of the EFL classroom.

Steven Charles has been teaching in Japan since 2003. After working in the Japanese public school system, he moved into university teaching.. He specializes in EFL writing with a particular focus on process writing. His research focus on peer review and self-assessment.