Exploring a Collaborative Approach to Peer Feedback in EFL Writing: How Do Students Participate?

Abstract

Although prior studies have suggested the benefits of a collaborative approach to providing peer feedback in EFL writing, little is known about how students engage in collaborative peer feedback (CPF) activities. This paper reports on a case study involving five Chinese EFL students who collaboratively provided feedback on five argumentative essays written by their peers. We examined the CPF results generated by the students and found that they paid more attention to content-related issues and that negative feedback was more frequent than positive feedback. We also investigated the steps that the students took during CPF and the collaboration skills that they adopted. This revealed a four-step CPF procedure that included initiation, planning, deliberation and summarisation. Furthermore, our analysis showed that the students effectively used six of the nine social process skills in the framework of Hesse et al.: action, interaction, task completion, adaptive responsiveness, negotiation and responsibility initiative. However, the other three skills, namely audience awareness, self-evaluation and transactive memory, were not sufficiently applied. We suggest that EFL teachers integrate CPF into writing classrooms to enhance students’ peer feedback performance. To enable successful CPF, teachers should help develop their students’ collaboration skills.

Keywords

Peer feedback collaborative learning EFL writing instructional strategies case study

Introduction

Among the pedagogical approaches to enhancing the writing competence of English as a foreign language (EFL) students, peer feedback has been widely adopted in writing classrooms (Alharbi, 2020; Hu and Lam, 2010). Peer feedback is an activity in which students read and evaluate each other's drafts (Storch, 2002), which can be beneficial for both the providers and recipients of the feedback (Lundstrom and Baker, 2009; Prior, 2006). For instance, peer feedback can give the recipients a sense of an audience and motivate them to write and revise with authentic purpose (Tsui and Ng, 2000). When giving feedback on their peers’ writing, the providers also have significant opportunities to reflect on their own writing and to recognise their own shortcomings (Yang, 2010). Moreover, for writing teachers, especially those who teach large classes, providing timely and sufficient written feedback is time-consuming and unfeasible. The amount of personalised feedback that they can give on each student's writing is limited (Er et al., 2021). Students often complain that teacher feedback on content tends to be general and sometimes even contradictory to their own ideas (Zacharias, 2007). In such scenarios, peer feedback can offer a realistic solution and help teachers solve these problems.

Although peer feedback can bring many benefits, it also has some disadvantages. The most commonly reported limitation is its quality. Compared with teacher feedback, the feedback provided by classmates might be of lower quality because of students’ broadly similar levels of writing competence and language proficiency. For example, peer feedback has been found to be non-specific more often than teacher feedback. Students have been found to be more willing to uptake teacher feedback that is specific and thus can better facilitate their revision process (Ruegg, 2015; Yang et al., 2006; Zacharias, 2007). Another notable problem with peer feedback pertains to its focus. Studies have revealed that EFL students, especially those who are untrained in giving feedback, tend to focus too much on surface-level features, such as grammar, vocabulary and punctuation, and comments regarding meaning-level issues, such as content and organisation, are only a minor part of their feedback (e.g. Levi Altstaedter, 2018; Min, 2006; Rahimi, 2013). One reason for students’ insufficient meaning-level feedback might be that content and structure issues require sophisticated writing and thinking skills, and EFL students, as novice writers, may have concerns about their ability to evaluate their peers’ writing from a higher-level perspective (Hu, 2005). They may also be concerned about saving face (Kamimura, 2006). That is, considering that meaning-level comments often lead to substantial revisions and changes to a draft, students might worry that their direct and negative feedback will cause embarrassment, which may make them feel reluctant to give feedback to their classmates.

To help EFL students dispel such concerns and encourage them to produce more valuable and constructive comments, some researchers have suggested a collaborative approach to peer feedback (Alshuraidah and Storch, 2019; Er et al., 2021; Manning and Jobbitt, 2019; Wigglesworth and Storch, 2012; Yu, 2015; Yu and Lee, 2015). In this collaborative peer feedback (CPF) approach, students read and evaluate their peers’ writing in pairs or small groups. From a social constructivist perspective (Vygotsky, 1978), CPF can be regarded as an interactive process in which students mutually support each other in generating comments on other students’ writing products. Empirical evidence has shown that CPF can increase both the amount and the quality of peer feedback (Alshuraidah and Storch, 2019), contributing to EFL students’ development of feedback literacy and writing competence. In particular, studies have indicated that when students write, evaluate and revise in pairs or groups, they tend to pay more attention to content issues (Kessler, 2009; Memari Hanjani, 2016), which helps to address the problem of unbalanced focus distribution in individual peer feedback. Moreover, Alshuraidah and Storch (2019) revealed that providing feedback in pairs can alleviate some of EFL students’ concerns about offering feedback individually on their peers’ writing, such as a lack of confidence in relying solely on their own linguistic knowledge. As a result, students showed a preference for peer collaboration when generating feedback.

Although positive effects of CPF on EFL students’ peer feedback performance have been suggested, few if any studies have closely examined the associated processes, and little is known about how students collaborate with each other in generating peer feedback. A better understanding of this issue will provide useful insights into the development of innovative teaching methods that feature CPF and thus promote EFL students’ writing competence. Therefore, the current study investigated EFL students’ participation in CPF by examining both the products and processes of their CPF. Specifically, the study was guided by three research questions (RQs):

What peer feedback do EFL students provide in a collaborative format?

What steps do EFL students take when participating in CPF?

What collaboration skills do EFL students use for completing CPF?

To provide a complete picture of how students participate in CPF activities, RQ1 focuses on students’ CPF products (i.e. feedback focus and attribute), while RQ2 and RQ3 focus on their CPF processes (i.e. steps and collaboration skills).

The Study

Context

To answer the three RQs, a case study was conducted in a 15-week English writing class in a university in China. Thirty-four first-year non-English-major undergraduates who had demonstrated high English proficiency on a test administered by the university enrolled on the writing course. The instructor was a non-native English speaker who had been teaching English in the university for about 20 years. One of the main teaching objectives was to help students master the skills of writing argumentative essays. The course featured a collaborative learning environment: the students formed self-selected groups at the beginning of the course (six groups in total; five to six students in each group) and collaboratively completed most of the learning tasks throughout the course.

Five writing topics were used in the course, including (a) navigation technology, (b) recycled water, (c) sugar consumption, (d) autonomous vehicles and (e) ecosystem protection. The students were required to argue for or against each topic. As presented in Figure 1, each writing topic lasted for three weeks. In the first week (writing outline), the students analysed and interpreted the writing task and developed a writing outline through group discussion. In the second week (collaborative writing), they collaboratively wrote an essay based on their discussion. In the third week (CPF), the students reviewed, commented on and provided feedback on an essay produced by another group.

Figure 1.

Learning tasks implemented in the writing class.

The CPF activity in each third week is the focus of this study. As shown in Figure 1, the CPF activity consisted of three stages. In the first stage (draft reading), the students were asked to read an essay drafted by one of the other five groups (randomly assigned by the instructor). In the second stage (group discussion), the students worked in groups to share their ideas on the draft and noted down their feedback on a worksheet prepared by the instructor. The worksheet prompted the students to provide at least three comments on the evaluated essay. This stage provided the students with opportunities to plan and organise their feedback collectively before providing it (Er et al., 2021). In the third stage (feedback provision), one representative from each group was randomly invited by the instructor to present their discussion results and orally provide feedback to the corresponding group and share their interpretations. This was expected to encourage feedback uptake by the group being reviewed (Zhu and Carless, 2018). Finally, the completed feedback worksheet was passed to the group for their reference to support their subsequent revision process. All three stages were implemented face to face in class.

Participants

One group of five students (one male and four females) was randomly selected as the focus of this case study. The aim of doing so was to provide a ‘thick description’ (Duff, 2008: 43) of the feedback that the students generated in a collaborative format, how they participated in CPF and what specific skills contributed to their collaboration and participation, which could inform EFL teachers about how to develop and implement CPF activities in writing classrooms. The five participants’ background information, including their sex, age, major and English proficiency level, is listed in Table 1. The students’ consent to participate in the study was obtained. All of the names used in this article are pseudonyms to ensure participant anonymity.

Table 1.

Background information about the participants.

Name	Sex	Age	Major	English proficiency
Robert	Male	20	Journalism and communications	CEFR B2 level
Amelia	Female	20	Journalism and communications	CEFR B2 level
Olivia	Female	20	Journalism and communications	CEFR B2 level
Sophia	Female	20	Journalism and communications	CEFR B2 level
Isabella	Female	20	Journalism and communications	CEFR B2 level

Note: The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) is an international standard for describing language ability.

Data Collection

To understand how the five EFL students participated in the CPF activities, the researchers audiotaped their group discussions and oral feedback presentations and collected their completed worksheets. From the five writing topics, five group discussions lasting between 5 and 10 minutes and five oral feedback presentations lasting two to three minutes (given by randomly selected representatives) were recorded, and five completed feedback worksheets were gathered. In addition, five argumentative essays generated by the other groups and evaluated by the focal group were collected. As presented in Table 2, the completed feedback worksheets were crucial for addressing RQ1, while the group discussion audio recordings were most important for answering RQ2 and RQ3. Thus, they were the main analytic objects in the study. The other data sources (i.e. oral feedback audio recordings and argumentative essays) were used to triangulate the main data to corroborate findings across data sets and reduce the impact of potential bias (Patton, 2015).

Table 2.

Data sources and purposes.

Data source		Purpose	Related RQ(s)
1	Completed feedback worksheets	To record the students’ CPF results in a written format	RQ1
2	Group discussion audio recordings	To record the students’ CPF processes	RQ2 and RQ3
3	Oral feedback audio recordings	To record the students CPF results in an oral format	RQ1
4	Argumentative essays evaluated	To help understand both the processes and results of the students’ CPF	RQ1, RQ2 and RQ3

Note: RQ: research question; CPF: collaborative peer feedback.

Data Analysis

Our analysis of the completed worksheets began with identifying feedback points. A comment that dealt with two issues was coded as two feedback points. Then, all feedback points were coded for focus. Following the approach adopted by Alshuraidah and Storch (2019), three focus categories were established: (a) structure-feedback related to issues such as the absence of topic sentences, (b) content-feedback focused on the quality and development of arguments (e.g. supporting evidence and logical reasoning) and (c) language-feedback pertaining to grammatical errors, word choice and mechanics (e.g. spelling and formatting). Further, the comments were analysed for whether they were positive or negative. Positive comments complimented writers on a particular aspect of the essay, whereas negative comments signalled a weakness or an error, either by pointing out the weakness directly or by recommending an improvement.

To analyse the group discussion audio recordings, we first transcribed them. The transcripts were then divided into episodes according to when the students initiated a new conversation topic. Based on the episodes, we summarised the students’ CPF steps at the group discussion stage of the CPF classroom activities. We also analysed the collaboration skills adopted by the students when completing the CPF tasks, as reflected within the conversational episodes. We used the framework of social process skills of Hesse et al. (2015) to code the students’ collaboration skills. Three main categories (participation, perspective taking and social regulation) are included in the framework, which are further divided into nine specific skills (see Table 3 for their definitions and indicators).

Table 3.

Coding scheme for collaboration skills.

Category	Specific skill	Definition	Indicator
Participation: the willingness and readiness of individuals to externalise and share information and thoughts, and to be involved in the stages of problem solving	1. Action	The general level of participation of an individual, irrespective of whether this action is in any way coordinated with the efforts of other group members	Activity within environment
	2. Interaction	The behaviour that demonstrates interaction with and responses to others	Interacting with, prompting and responding to the contributions of others
	3. Task completion	Motivational aspects of participation and consequent perseverance on a task	Undertaking and completing a task or part of a task individually
Perspective taking: the ability to see a problem through the eyes of a collaborator	4. Adaptive responsiveness	Responding skills become apparent when problem solvers manage to integrate contributions of collaborators into their own thoughts and actions	Ignoring, accepting or adapting contributions of others
	5. Audience awareness	The ability to tailor one's contributions to others	Awareness of how to adapt behaviour to increase suitability for others
Social regulation: the use of awareness of the strengths and weaknesses of all group members to coordinate and resolve potential differences in viewpoints, interests and strategies	6. Negotiation	The ability to solve the conflicts arising among group members	Achieving a resolution or reaching compromise
	7. Self-evaluation (Metamemory)	The ability to recognise group diversity with knowledge about oneself	Recognising own strengths and weaknesses
	8. Transactive memory	The ability to recognise group diversity with knowledge about the knowledge, strengths and weaknesses of one's collaborators	Recognising strengths and weaknesses of others
	9. Responsibility initiative	The responsibility that a problem solver experiences for the progress of the group	Assuming responsibility for ensuring parts of the task are completed by the group

Note: Adapted from Hesse et al. (2015).

We relied on the completed feedback worksheets and oral feedback audio recordings to analyse the participants’ CPF results rather than considering every piece of feedback they had talked about during their group discussions because some issues were not included in the feedback given to the group being evaluated. Thus, we did not regard such feedback as the students’ CPF results; we treated it as part of the students’ CPF processes during which they negotiated to reach agreement.

The first round of coding was conducted by the first author. To ensure intra-coder reliability, he recoded the data after a one-month interval. The intra-coder agreement was >95%. After these two rounds of coding by the first author, the second author coded 25% of the data. The inter-coder agreement was >90%. All of the discrepancies were discussed until a final agreement was reached.

Findings

What Peer Feedback Do EFL Students Provide in a Collaborative Format? (RQ1)

Table 4 summarises our findings regarding the five students’ CPF products. The table shows the number of feedback points provided by the students under the three categories (structure, content and language). Nearly half of the students’ comments (48% of all feedback points) concentrated on the content aspect of the essays, and 29% and 23% of the total were language- and structure-related, respectively. A closer look at the content-focused comments showed that they predominantly concerned two key issues in argument creation: the use of supporting evidence and logical reasoning. For example, the students pointed out that ‘the evidence adopted is not trustworthy enough and thus cannot effectively back the argument’ (topic 2). They also noted that ‘there seems to be contradiction between these two arguments’ (topic 4).

Table 4.

Distribution of the five students’ CPF.

Feedback focus	Number of feedback points	Percentage
(1) Structure	Positive comments: 3	8%
(1) Structure	Negative comments: 6	15%
(2) Content	Positive comments: 4	10%
(2) Content	Negative comments: 15	38%
(3) Language	Positive comments: 3	8%
(3) Language	Negative comments: 8	21%
Total	39	100%

In addition, the table shows the numbers of positive and negative comments provided by the five students. Of the 39 feedback points, 29 (74%) were negative and 10 (26%) were positive. Furthermore, negative comments were more frequent in all three categories. In particular, when commenting on the content aspect, the students offered much more negative feedback (38% of all feedback points) than positive feedback (10% of all feedback points).

What Steps Do EFL Students Take When Participating in CPF? (RQ2)

As shown in Figure 2, four prominent steps were identified in the five students’ CPF processes: (a) initiation, (b) planning, (c) deliberation and (d) summarisation.

Figure 2.

The students’ four-step collaborative peer feedback (CPF) process.

Step 1: Initiation

When engaging in the CPF activities, the five students usually initiated their group discussion using warm-up conversations. For example, Olivia said, ‘Shall we begin now?’ (topic 1), and Robert said, ‘Come on! Come on!’ (topic 2) to call upon their teammates to start the discussion. At the beginning of their discussion, the students often started by pointing out obvious mistakes in their peers’ essays, most of which were focused on such surface-level features as spelling mistakes, grammatical errors and in-text citation conventions. The students brought these issues to their teammates’ attention, but they did not spend much time discussing them further. Thus, the initiation step usually only lasted for a short time.

Step 2: Planning

After quickly initiating their discussion, the group of students constructed a shared understanding of the evaluated essay and established a consensus on its overall quality. For example, Sophia commented, ‘Generally, I think the quality of this essay is not very high’ (topic 2). After reaching a consensus, they started to plan how to provide their peer feedback on the essay (such as how many comments they would like to offer and the main focus of their comments). For example, Amelia suggested, ‘We could include both strengths and weaknesses of their essay’ (topic 3). Through this planning step, the students’ feedback process gradually became organised, as distinct from their casual conversation in the prior step. More importantly, they started to pay attention to meaning-level issues, which were more in-depth and comprehensive than their initial comments in step 1. For example, following Amelia's suggestion that they mention both strengths and weaknesses, Isabella and Robert briefly shared their comments related to the content organisation and use of evidence in the essay.

Step 3: Deliberation

After making a preliminary plan, the students further discussed the concrete feedback they wanted to give. This was the most important and time-consuming step in their CPF, taking five minutes on average (approximately 60% of their group discussion time). Generally, one member came up with a piece of feedback, and the other members discussed and added to it. Of note is that their discussion in this step primarily concentrated on the meaning-level issues of the assessed essay, such as argument logic, supporting evidence and content organisation, with more elaboration and clearer explanation than their brief comments in step 2.

There were two main types of discussion on the proposed feedback. When the members of the group all agreed with the proposed feedback, they showed their support and helped to elaborate on it. For example, in topic 2, Robert said, ‘I think the argument in the third paragraph is not strong enough’. Olivia indicated her agreement, saying ‘Yes, it's kind of bad’, and Sophia continued by saying ‘I think this is due to their misunderstanding of the topic’. When the proposed feedback was not advocated by all members of the group, the students negotiated with each other so that they could reach a consensus. For instance, in topic 3, Amelia said, ‘I think they should integrate their third paragraph into the second one, as they are discussing the same thing’. However, Olivia held a different opinion and explained that ‘Actually, their third paragraph emphasises that […], which is different from the main idea of the previous paragraph. So, they should be separated’. Then, Isabella said, ‘Well, I think both of your ideas make sense. Perhaps, we could say that they didn’t present their arguments in a clear way, which might cause readers’ confusion and even misinterpretation of their ideas’.

Step 4: Summarisation

After careful deliberation in the prior step, the students finally summarised the feedback they had discussed and completed the worksheets to present their final feedback clearly and prepare for the next stage of the CPF activity (feedback provision).

It should be noted that although the four steps above were identified in all five CPF group discussions and appeared in roughly the same sequence, they could be overlapping, interconnected and not necessarily linear. For example, the students sometimes adjusted their original feedback plan in the deliberation step when they noted the necessity of the adjustment.

What Collaboration Skills Do EFL Students Use for Completing CPF? (RQ3)

A total of 65 conversational episodes reflecting the students’ collaboration skills were identified in the group discussion transcripts. As shown in Figure 3, seven out of the nine skills in the framework of Hesse et al. (2015) were applied by the students, including action, interaction, task completion, adaptive responsiveness, audience awareness, negotiation and responsibility initiative; the other two skills, self-evaluation and transactive memory, were not identified in the transcripts.

Figure 3.

Collaboration skills applied by the students during CPF.

Of the three participation skills, the action skill (n = 15), exemplified by talking about one's own understanding of the evaluated essay, was most frequently used by the students. It was also the most commonly used skill of the nine skills, indicating the five students’ active participation in the CPF activities. The next most frequently used skill was interaction (n = 13). The five students interacted with each other when comprehending the evaluated essays and generating feedback by prompting and responding to each other's contributions. For example, Olivia commented, ‘It seems that they provided too much information irrelevant to their main claim’, and Sophia confirmed, ‘Yes, they are off topic indeed’ (topic 1). In topic 3, after Amelia provided a suggestion on how to organise their feedback (by including both strengths and weaknesses, as mentioned above), Sophia agreed with her and said, ‘Yes, we could first recognise the advantages of the essay and then point out its disadvantages’. Then, Isabella shared her comments regarding the organisation of the essay: ‘I think they effectively used sub-headings to divide the whole essay into several parts, which made its structure very clear. That's a good aspect’. Robert added, ‘But the evidence they used seemed not very relevant to their main argument. That's what they should try to improve’. Regarding the skill of task completion (n = 9), although the students completed all five CPF tasks, they demonstrated different degrees of commitment to the learning tasks throughout the course. Specifically, in topics 1–4, they sufficiently engaged in the group discussions. However, in the final topic, their engagement was not adequate, as indicated by the duration of their discussion time (roughly half as long as before) and off-topic conversation. This might have been because it was the fifth round and their motivation and enthusiasm had decreased.

Regarding the two perspective-taking skills, the students demonstrated high adaptive responsiveness (n = 8) but low audience awareness (n = 4). Generally, they often responded to, incorporated and synthesised each other's contributions to generate final feedback. However, they did not adequately adapt to their communication partners during the discussions. Especially in the deliberation step, when they tried to bring a particular piece of feedback to their group mates’ attention, they often directly jumped in without considering whether the prior discussion had been completed. They also usually started with their suggestions on how to revise the essay without telling their partners which part of the essay they were talking about. As a result, the other students had to seek clarification (e.g. ‘Sorry, which paragraph are you referring to?’, asked by Sophia in topic 3), which wasted some discussion time.

Among the four social regulation skills, the skill of responsibility initiative (n = 9), exemplified by assuming responsibility, was primarily adopted by Robert, who was the group leader and volunteered to be responsible for taking notes during the discussions. He often tried to summarise the feedback discussed and wrote it down on the worksheets in the final step of summarisation. The other students also shared collective responsibility by allocating tasks. For example, Olivia said, ‘We need to read the essay more carefully so that we can make sure this negative comment does not result from our misunderstanding. I will look at the first half of it and some of you can examine the second half’ (topic 5). Here, Olivia's use of the first-person pronoun ‘we’ was also an indicator of their collective responsibility. Another important social regulation skill that significantly contributed to the five students’ CPF was the negotiation skill (n = 7), which was exemplified by the exchange of views to achieve a resolution, especially when conflicts arose. For instance, as mentioned earlier, Isabella proposed a solution that helped resolve the disagreement between Amelia and Olivia regarding whether the two paragraphs should be merged (topic 3). Notably, the other two social regulation skills – self-evaluation (n = 0) and transactive memory (n = 0) – were not identified in the students’ CPF processes. In other words, the students did not recognise their group diversity by talking about their own or their collaborator's strengths and weaknesses in collaboration or peer feedback generation.

Discussion

This case study explored how a group of five Chinese EFL students collaboratively provided feedback on their peers’ writing. The students’ CPF results were examined in terms of their feedback focus and attribute (i.e. positive vs. negative). The findings showed that when generating feedback in a collaborative way, the students paid the most attention to content-centred issues, followed by language- and structure-related aspects, and offered more negative comments than positive ones. More importantly, most of their negative feedback was specific and constructive, which could improve the quality of the assessed essay. Consistent with the findings of previous studies (e.g. Alshuraidah and Storch, 2019), these results suggest that CPF encouraged the students to evaluate their peers’ writing in a more critical way, enhancing the quality of their feedback.

Moreover, the students’ CPF processes were examined in detail, and the steps they took in completing the CPF tasks were identified. Specifically, the students first initiated their discussion with a warm-up conversation and pointed out obvious surface-level mistakes (e.g. spelling and grammatical errors) in the evaluated essay. Then, they constructed a shared understanding of the essay, made an overall evaluation of it and planned their feedback generation. By agreeing on what was inadequate in the assessed essay, the students accomplished a shared focus for their feedback. Further, they deliberated on concrete feedback that they would like to provide, which mainly concentrated on meaning-level issues (e.g. content, structure and logic). Finally, they summarised their discussion and offered their feedback to their peers.

This study also examined the collaboration skills that the students used during the CPF processes. They actively participated in the CPF activities by adopting action, interaction and task completion skills. More importantly, their interaction quality was relatively high, as indicated by their adequate adoption of the adaptive responsiveness skill. They also shared collective responsibility and skilfully negotiated with each other when encountering conflicts. Their adoption of such skills contributed to their successful coordination and completion of the CPF tasks. However, the audience awareness skill was not sufficiently applied by the five students, which may have negatively affected the effectiveness of their communication. Moreover, self-evaluation and transactive memory skills were not identified in their discussions. That is, the students did not sufficiently evaluate either their own or their collaborators’ strengths and weaknesses in collaboration.

The findings suggest that the innovative pedagogical approach of CPF can bring many benefits to EFL students. First, it can help students engage in peer feedback in a more structured and organised way, as indicated by the four major steps that the students took when engaging in the process. Second, consistent with the findings of previous research (Alshuraidah and Storch, 2019; Kessler, 2009), CPF can contribute to students’ increased attention to the meaning-level features of their peers’ writing and improvement of their feedback quality. Third, during CPF, students have opportunities to reflect on and improve their own writing through interaction with team members. In other words, they can learn not only from the peers that they are evaluating (which is a benefit of individual peer feedback) but also from those who are working with them in generating the evaluation. For example, when Isabella pointed out some problems with in-text citation conventions in the essay for topic 3, Sophia realised that she made the same mistake in her own writing. Fourth, CPF can reduce students’ concerns about saving face (Kamimura, 2006). At first (i.e. in topics 1 and 2), the students demonstrated this concern during their group discussions (e.g. Robert said, ‘Let's be gentle!’ in topic 2) because they gave feedback to their peers face to face in class in stage 3 (feedback provision). However, in topics 3–5, the students were no longer hesitant to give negative comments. This might be due to the support and encouragement they received from their group mates when they shared and discussed the negative feedback during the CPF processes. In addition, as the feedback was provided in the name of the whole group, the students did not need to worry that any individual member would have to take responsibility for it.

One possible limitation of this study is that it primarily relied on the students’ audio-recorded group discussions to examine the collaboration skills they adopted during their CPF processes. However, some skills may not be reflected by verbal communication. This might explain why self-evaluation and transactive memory skills were not identified in the students’ CPF processes. Future studies could use more data sources (e.g. interviews) to better understand the collaboration skills that students use in CPF.

Conclusion

Although CPF has been recommended in the literature, few studies have examined EFL students’ CPF processes. This study provides an exploratory step towards understanding how students participate in CPF activities from the perspective of social interaction. It is hoped that our findings can provide pedagogical insights for the adoption of CPF in EFL writing classrooms. Based on the CPF steps depicted in this study, teachers can use their class time in a productive way by, for example, allowing more time for students’ in-depth deliberation (the third CPF step, which is critical and relatively time-consuming) to let students fully share their thoughts and negotiate with each other. We also suggest that teachers provide adequate scaffolding to guide students through the CPF process, such as by using worksheets incorporating specific prompts for each step. More importantly, as CPF requires students to master skills in both generating feedback and collaborating with each other, teachers are encouraged to pay attention to cultivating students’ collaboration skills before engaging them in CPF activities. In particular, perspective taking and social regulation skills should be taught explicitly. For example, improved self-evaluation and transactive memory skills will help students better recognise their group diversity and engage in their collaborative work more effectively. Video modelling could be used in the development of instruction (see Granado-Peinado et al., 2019). Teachers could invite a group of volunteers to simulate an expert CPF task in which they use various collaboration skills effectively. Recording their performance and showing students the videos could help them to master these skills.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors report there are no competing interests to declare.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Kai Guo

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