The Impact of Japanese University Students’ EFL Writing Class Community on their Peer Review Activities and Learning of EFL Writing

抄録

This study aims to investigate the relationship between Japanese university students’ class community and their peer review activities in an EFL writing class. Their average TOEIC score was 675. They were asked to engage in peer review and write comments about their classmates’ essays in the left-hand column of the Peer-editing Sheet in class. In the right-hand column, they specified how they would respond to their peer reviewers’ comments. This study’s data mainly consists of their feedback and responses in the Peer-editing Sheet and their final interviews. From their comments and responses in the Peer-editing Sheet, they are observed to have gradually incorporated “a third person’s point of view” into their evaluation of their own essays toward the end of the period of study. Their interviews seem to imply that reading others’ essays brought them various educational benefits such as raised awareness of their readers perspective, how to improve their writing by observing others’ essays, etc. Finally, based on the “educational benefits” that a community can produce, it is proposed that peer review activities should be more extensively utilized in order to help learners grow as autonomous writers.