Engaged and Interactive Peer Review: Introducing Peer Review Circles

The Teaching Context

Many textbooks include peer-review checklists or sets of questions to be completed by the reviewer and discussed with the writer, typically through pair work. However, our experience teaching South Korean university undergraduates had shown that most students disliked peer review, ignored peer comments, and valued feedback only from their instructor. Students complained that peers often only complimented their writing and gave vague or little feedback. Yu and Hu (2017: 32) had a similar complaint with their observation of a student named Leo who held back negative opinions about content and language out of consideration for his partner’s feelings. Unlike Leo, who withheld his criticism to maintain group harmony, our students replaced criticism with praise to maintain harmony. This may have smoothed the discussion but was privately disliked. One complained, ‘I just exchanged papers with others and they wrote good things…[that] did not help me to fix my research paper’ (student end-of-semester survey response). We also observed limited discussion of the reviewer’s comments. After returning the reviewed papers, our students would quickly skim the commentary and then wait silently for the teacher to end the activity or talk to each other in L1 on other topics.

Feeling that discussion is an essential element of both peer review and language learning (Swain, 2010) and that reviewing another’s draft would improve their own writing (Lundstrom and Baker, 2009), we determined to upgrade our peer review process. Using Literature Circles (Daniels, 1994) as our model and Rollinson (2005) as a guide, we designed an interactive peer review activity which required interaction and collaborative discussion. We call this approach ‘Peer Review Circles’ (PRC).

The Innovation: Peer Review Circles

Briefly, a Peer Review Circle (PRC) is an opinion-gap, pedagogical task (Ellis, 2003). Students are divided into small groups. We made triads: Writer (W), Main Reviewer (MR), and Secondary Reviewer (SR). Each member gives a copy of their draft to the other members. Everyone reads everyone else’s writing. The MR also answers a set of questions on a feedback question sheet (FQS) about the work. The MR starts the discussion with a 2-minute monologue about the essay they just read.

Rollinson writes, ‘Oral feedback may usefully involve reader discussion preceding the reader-writer conference’ (2005: 29). Following his idea, we included an opening monologue to promote discussion. We asked the MR to speak to another reader to mitigate threats to the W’s face and the 2-minute minimum time ensured enough was said to give the others something to respond to (similar to Yu and Hu, 2017: 32 mentioning a 30-word minimum response). Therefore, the MR starts the discussion while the other group members remain silent. Then, the SR and MR jointly discuss both the essay and the MR’s feedback while the W remains silent. The MR-SR dialogue gives both reviewers a chance to clarify their ideas so the W receives jointly-negotiated feedback, not just one reader’s opinion. It also gives the MR input on the feedback they have given: the SR may disagree, offer alternatives, agree, or contribute something the MR had not considered. The W remains silent and may take notes if desired. After five minutes, the W joins the discussion to answer any concerns, give explanations, or ask for feedback on something not yet covered. The whole process is repeated until all essays have been reviewed.

Unlike what is usually included in many EFL writing textbooks – a set of questions to answer privately and return to the writer – the PRC is a group process of public discussion of each writer’s writing. It requires students to publicly explain to others what they think – thereby engaging linguistic, discourse, and socio-pragmatic knowledge. By requiring public talk about a peer’s writing, a communicative event is created in which the speaker (MR) makes and justifies claims, and the listeners (W and SR) then evaluate, accept, challenge, or collaborate to improve the writing and the feedback. By providing both an audience for the writing and for the evaluation of the writing, we encourage learners to make a robust effort at providing feedback. For two semesters, we used PRCs in our writing classes. We recorded students’ PRC talk, observed their discussions, asked students to reflect on and critique the PRC, and we then adapted the PRC to resolve their concerns. The next section explains the process of doing this ‘revised’ PRC.

Peer Review Circles: Setting Up and Running

The PRC is a sequence of: (1) setting up the class and assigning roles, (2) reading another’s work and analysing it, (3) performing three monologue-dialogue-discussion (MDD) cycles, and (4) reflecting.

Stage 3: Monologue-dialogue-discussion (MDD) Cycles (12 minutes each)

MDD cycles are the heart of the PRC task. When students are in triads, there are three cycles (one for each student’s essay) ² with three steps per cycle. In the first cycle, student A is the writer (W), student B is the main reviewer (MR), and student C is the secondary reviewer (SR).

M: Main Reviewer’s (MR’s) Monologue (2 min)

To start the PRC, the MR faces the SR and speaks without interruption for two minutes. In the monologue (M), the MR gives feedback first on the specific FQS questions which the writer (W) had put forward to be answered and adds further feedback about the writing until two minutes have elapsed. To avoid minimal contributions, such as ‘It’s good’, the MR is required to keep speaking until the two minutes are exhausted. The other two students remain silent ³ (See Figure 1).

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Figure 1.

MDD cycle, step 1: main reviewer’s monologue.

D: ‘Reviewers’ Dialogue’ between MR and SR (5 min)

The monologue provides the basis for the Reviewers’ Dialogue. The dialogue is a question-answer session between the two reviewers, while the writer (W) continues to remain silent. The SR comments on what the MR said and adds feedback on the essay. The MR and SR make suggestions to improve the writing, attempt to clarify parts they did not understand, and try to determine the writer’s intentions. The two reviewers keep talking until the time limit is reached. The reason for keeping the writers silent for two steps is to give them a feeling for how others understand and relate to their work – i.e. a notion of any difference between their intentions versus their audience’s potential interpretation (See Figure 2).

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Figure 2.

MDD cycle, step 2: main and secondary reviewers’ dialogue about the writing.

D: ‘Discussion with the Writer’ – W and MR and SR Talk (5 min)

Now, the W joins the conversation. The W may clarify issues the others had with the writing, ask further questions, request feedback on other points, or collaborate with the reviewers to rephrase problematic parts (See Figure 3). After time expires, students switch roles and briefly skim the next essay (2 minutes) before starting a new MDD cycle.

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Figure 3.

MDD cycle step 3: writer joins the discussion.

An Example: The Discursive Development of a Thesis Statement in PRC Talk

This section outlines a single case of how PRC talk led to a more precise thesis statement in the final draft of a student-writer’s essay. Three students, Julie, Joseph, and Jean (pseudonyms) performed a PRC on an essay Jean had written (W). Julie is the MR and Joseph is the SR.

The PRC began with the main reviewer’s (i.e. Julie’s) monologue. During the monologue, she said:

Julie’s mentioning of ‘three things’ is referring to the course instruction ⁴ that thesis statements should contain: the topic, the writer’s claim about the topic, and a three-part writing plan that outlines the subtopics to be covered in the essay. Julie has noted two problems with the draft’s thesis statement: there are only two elements, and the first element is vague. However. Julie does not offer any advice on how to remedy the situation.

The next step in the MDD cycle is a dialogue between the MR and SR while the W listens. Joseph begins the dialogue with:

This aligns with Julie’s comment. Yet, in the spirit of a collaborative reviewer, he continues the line of discussion to include specific help to the writer, who he knows is listening.

Joseph has identified the topical content of Jean’s essay’s body paragraphs and is using it to offer a potential three-part writing plan for her thesis statement. Julie acknowledges this with a brief, ‘Yeah.’

Joseph’s advice is a suggestion and Jean, as writer, has the option to accept or reject it. She both uses and improves it. Her final thesis statement contained a clear writing plan (underlined in [4]) to help her readers follow her argument:

Jean has changed the wording and the order of the subtopics. ‘Expense’ specifies the key part of the ‘procedures of a marriage’ Joseph stated in (3). The final two subtopics have been switched in order to reflect Jean’s focus. The term ‘economic debt’ specifies why foreign women need support, and what Jean had considered the biggest problem: ‘deceptive matchmaking agencies’, has been moved to the end of the thesis statement.

Although the initial monologue did not proffer specific advice, it prompted a dialogue in which the SR clarified the MR’s observations while the W could not interrupt. This change in discussion dynamics allowed time and space for the review to be refined. Although the W did not comment on the thesis during the discussion, preferring to discuss other things, her final version shows she heard the advice and adjusted it to accommodate her views. Thus, by expanding peer review from one reviewer to two, requiring dialogue in the review, and requiring the writer to listen first before responding, feedback is honed, resulting in appropriate, actionable feedback on the writer’s work.

Reflection and Future Directions

This article has outlined an interactive task that encourages communication about the quality and effectiveness of another student’s writing. We feel that it has improved our students’ writing and that students have become more interested in getting feedback in general – evidenced by more student visits to our offices and by self-reported showing of their essays to friends or family members before submission, two rare events in classes without PRCs. These anecdotal observations should be verified by further research.

In the rare event that a student arrived at the PRC without their draft, we provided a sample, or placed them in a group as a reader only. They then gave feedback but could not receive any. For lower proficiency learners, the writing assignment would necessarily be shorter, and PRCs can be adapted through simpler questions, or allowing more reading time.

It may appear that the PRC is overly structured yet, the Monologue-Dialogue-Discussion format allows feedback to evolve from a vague concept to a specific fix through talk. The public nature of the MDD cycle pushed students to perform up to expectations set by their peers (cf. Willis and Willis, 2007). It allowed multiple iterations of new language; practise in turn-taking; and many opportunities to express, clarify and defend opinions about content and language – all activities relevant to learning language and improving writing. Performance expectations were explicated in students’ reflections. Early-semester PRC reflections contained student complaints about compliments and vague feedback along with promises not to do this. Later PRC reflections had no such complaints. Recordings of PRC talk revealed that talking about the writing allowed the two reviewers to give more precise comments (Extracts 1 and 3) to the writer, and to avoid the pitfalls we noticed in one-to-one peer review activities: simple compliments, vague feedback, and limited discussion. Finally, several students reported it was ‘less stressful’ to listen to others discuss their work than to be told directly. We feel that by creating an activity requiring phases of public talk and roles for each person in each phase (the PRC) we encouraged students to create a classroom culture which valued peer review.