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Opening Pandora’s box: how does peer assessment affect EFL students’ writing quality?

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Meletiadou, Eleni (2021) Opening Pandora’s box: how does peer assessment affect EFL students’ writing quality? Languages, 6 (115). pp. 1-17. ISSN 2226-471X

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Abstract

Recent research has underlined the beneﬁts of peer assessment (PA) as it helps learners write high-quality essays and increases their conﬁdence as writers. In terms of this intervention study, 200 Greek Cypriot EFL learners’ essays (pre- and post-tests) were evaluated taking into consideration four aspects of writing quality after using either PA and teacher assessment (TA) (experimental groups, n = 100 students) or only TA (control groups, n = 100 students) in their writing classes for one year. This is one of the few studies, to the knowledge of the present researcher, which have performed text analysis of so many aspects of writing quality using such a - relatively - large sample (400 essays) in such a challenging setting (secondary education). Learners’ essays were evaluated in terms of accuracy, ﬂuency, grammatical complexity, and lexical complexity using Atlas.ti. Findings indicated that learners who received PA and TA improved their essays more in terms of lexical complexity, accuracy, and some features of grammatical complexity and ﬂuency than those who received only TA. The current study highlights the desirability of collaborative group work, in the form of PA activities, in the creation of opportunities conducive to promoting writing quality.

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