Abstract
This chapter investigates the effect of self-review, peer review and teacher feedback on the English narrative writing skills of EFL students of different proficiency levels. It particularly focuses on the correction of content (story grammar) and form (grammar accuracy). Two lecturers and six first-year students at a Moroccan university of different writing ability (two high-level, two mid-level and two low-level) participated in the study. The students were asked to write timed narrative essays and then correct their drafts, in untimed conditions, based on self-review (by means of a checklist), peer review and lecturer feedback. They also expressed their views on the three types of feedback through a think-aloud protocol. Our findings suggest that the higher the ability level, the more self-corrections take place. The benefits of peer review are largely determined by student ability level. While lecturer review seems to better address accuracy, salience is a determinant factor: the more salient the teacher’s feedback is, the more students correct their drafts accordingly. Results of the think-aloud protocol suggest that unlike high-ability and medium-ability students, low-ability students tend to lack trust in their peers’ feedback. Moreover, content was neglected by both students and lecturers in our study and thus very little change was identified across students’ drafts.
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Notes
- 1.
To protect the confidentiality of participants, pseudonyms have been used.
- 2.
This quantification was conducted by turning the number of errors that were actually corrected by each category of student in the self-assessment phase into a percentage.
- 3.
No effort was made to correct the students’ errors as the erroneous tense shift in this example illustrates.
- 4.
Most of the data collected from the think-aloud protocol was in Moroccan Arabic or French, since we encouraged participants to speak in the language they felt most comfortable with. As such, some of the student quotes in this paper have been transcribed into English by the authors.
- 5.
Due to space constraints, some content from the excerpt has been removed.
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Appendix
Appendix
Checklist for Essay Revision
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Instructions: This checklist will help you revise your narrative essay. Read it carefully before starting revision.
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Marco-level Components
My story starts with a setting that includes the following details:
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a.
Time
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b.
Place
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c.
Characters
My story has an episode which contains the following constituents:
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a.
Initiating event (what happened?)
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b.
Internal response (how did you feel?)
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c.
Attempt (what did you do about it?)
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d.
Consequence (did you attain your goal?)
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Micro-level Components
Read your essay and make sure that it meets the following criteria:
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a.
It does not have any run-ons, fragments or comma splices.
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b.
Articles and demonstratives are correctly used.
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c.
Verbs and their subjects agree in every sentence.
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d.
No tense shift (make sure you are using past tenses correctly).
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e.
Every pronoun has a clear referent which can be identified in the text.
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f.
Words are used appropriately.
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g.
Every sentence begins with a capital and ends with a full stop.
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h.
Commas, colons, semi-colons, apostrophes and other punctuation marks are used correctly.
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i.
Word spelling is accurate.
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j.
Paragraphs are indented.
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Zyad, H., Bouziane, A. (2020). The Effect of EFL Correction Practices on Developing Moroccan Students’ English Writing Skills. In: Ahmed, A., Troudi, S., Riley, S. (eds) Feedback in L2 English Writing in the Arab World. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25830-6_5
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