The effects of peer feedback on discussion boards on efl students writing performance m a 60 14 10

VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY – HO CHI MINH CITY
UNIVERSITY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES & HUMANITIES
FACULTY OF ENGLISH LINGUISTICS & LITERATURE

THE EFFECTS OF PEER FEEDBACK
ON DISCUSSION BOARDS
ON EFL STUDENTS’ WRITING PERFORMANCE

A thesis submitted to the
Faculty of English Linguistics & Literature
in partial fulfillment of the Master’s degree in TESOL

By
NGHIEM THI THU NGA

Supervised by
DANG TAN TIN, Ph.D.

HO CHI MINH CITY, DECEMBER 2017


VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY – HO CHI MINH CITY
UNIVERSITY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES & HUMANITIES
FACULTY OF ENGLISH LINGUISTICS & LITERATURE

THE EFFECTS OF PEER FEEDBACK
ON DISCUSSION BOARDS
ON EFL STUDENTS’ WRITING PERFORMANCE

A thesis submitted to the
Faculty of English Linguistics & Literature

in partial fulfillment of the Master’s degree in TESOL

By
NGHIEM THI THU NGA

Supervised by
DANG TAN TIN, Ph.D.

HO CHI MINH CITY, DECEMBER 2017


APPROVAL SHEET


ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Firstly, I would like to express my deep gratitude and appreciation to my
supervisor, Dr. Dang Tan Tin, who gave me precious comments to help orientate my
research focus and encouragement to continue doing my thesis. As an experienced
researcher, he was willing to offer help and advice when I encountered difficulties in
conducting my research. He had inspired my research idea about the application of
Information Technology in English language teaching when I was taking his ComputerAssisted Language Learning course.
In addition, I would like to send my special thanks to the Board of Examiner,
including Dr. Le Hoang Dung, Dr. Pho Phuong Dung, Dr. Nguyen Thi Hong Tham, Dr.
Tran Thi Minh Phuong, and Dr. Nguyen Thi Kieu Thu for their invaluable comments
during the time I presented my proposal. I am also grateful to Dr. Nguyen Thu Huong,
and Ms. Pham Ngoc Kim Tuyen for their special concern during the time I was shaping
my research title.
Besides, I would like to acknowledge the detailed guidance and the assistance of
the lecturers of the Faculty of Foreign Languages in the University of Technical
Education. They also gave me useful advice about the course content, the students’

characteristics and the teaching methodology when I started my teaching career as a
novice lecturer in this university.
I am also indebted to Mr. Hoang Nam and Ms. Lan Anh, my two dear friends,
who gave me practical advice based on their teaching experience.
Moreover, my research would not be completed without the participation of the
students in the two courses Writing 2 - code WRIT120235_03 and Writing 3 – code
WRIT220335_01. Thanks to these participants’ enthusiasm, I could investigate the
effects of information technology on their language performance to help them make
progress in learning English.
I would like to thank my family members, who gave me financial and mental
support to complete my MA program.
Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to Blessed Virgin Mary for her
miracles that are out of my imagination.

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STATEMENT OF ORIGINALITY
The thesis entitled “The effects of peer feedback on discussion boards on EFL
students’ writing performance” is conducted under the supervision of Doctor Dang Tan
Tin.
I declare that the content of the thesis is my own research, except where due
reference is made. Other authors’ works have been used with proper acknowledgement
in the main text of the thesis. This thesis has not been submitted for any degree or
diploma in any other tertiary institution.

NGHIEM THI THU NGA
December, 2017

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RETENTION OF USE

I agree to let the library of the University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Ho
Chi Minh City and the English Resource Center of the Faculty of English Linguistics
and Literature to use my thesis for the purpose of reference.

NGHIEM THI THU NGA
December, 2017

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements ........................................................................................ i
Statement of originality ................................................................................. ii
Retention of use ............................................................................................ iii
Table of contents .......................................................................................... iv
List of abbreviations ..................................................................................... vi
List of tables ................................................................................................ vii
List of figures.............................................................................................. viii
Abstract ......................................................................................................... ix
CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION .............................................................. 1
1.1. Background to the study ................................................................... 3
1.2. Aims of the study .............................................................................. 7
1.3 Research questions ............................................................................. 8
1.4 Significance of the study .................................................................... 8
1.5 Scope of the study .............................................................................. 8
1.6 Outline of the thesis ........................................................................... 9

CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW ................................................ 10
2.1 Definitions of terms ......................................................................... 10
2.2 Review of previous studies .............................................................. 18
CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY ........................................................... 35
3.1 Research questions ........................................................................... 35
3.2 Research design................................................................................ 35
3.3 Research site .................................................................................... 37
3.4 Participants ....................................................................................... 37
3.5 Research instruments ....................................................................... 38
3.6 Data collection procedure ................................................................ 40
3.7 Data analysis procedure ................................................................... 46
CHAPTER 4: RESULTS AND DISCUSSION ....................................... 49
4.1 Analysis of data ................................................................................ 49
4.2 Discussion of results ...................................................................... 116
4.3 Findings .......................................................................................... 118
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4.4 Summary ........................................................................................ 118
CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION ............................................................... 120
5.1 Conclusion ..................................................................................... 120
5.2 Pedagogical implications ............................................................... 121
5.3 Limitation of the study ................................................................... 122
5.4 Recommendation for further study ................................................ 126
REFERENCES ........................................................................................ 128
APPENDICES .......................................................................................... 141
Appendix A: The tests.......................................................................... 141
Appendix B: The Pre-test and the Post-test scores of the Experimental Group and
the Control Group ................................................................................ 142
Appendix C: Criteria for peer feedback ............................................... 146

Appendix D: Topics for discussion boards .......................................... 151
Appendix E: The questionnaire ........................................................... 157
Appendix F: The interview questions .................................................. 160
Appendix G: The interview transcript ................................................. 161

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LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
BA: Bachelor of Arts
CG: Control group
DB: Discussion board
EFL: English as a foreign language
EG: Experimental group
ELT: English language teaching
FCE: First Certificate in English
HCMUTE: Ho Chi Minh University of Technical Education
ICT: Information and Communications Technology
IELTS: International English Language Testing System
LMS: Learning Management System
MA: Master of Arts
MOODLE: Modular-Object Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment
SPSS: Statistical Package for Social Sciences
TOEFL: Test of English as a foreign language
VN: Vietnam

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LIST OF TABLES

Table 1: The Foreign Language Faculty’s points according to each criterion.
Table 2: The comparison between the IELTS score and the Faculty’s scores
Table 3: The IELTS band scores
Table 4: The IELTS band scores and the equivalent of in-class scores
Table 5: Benefits and limitations of peer feedback on discussion boards
Table 6: Data collection procedure
Table 7: Test of normal distribution
Table 8: Statistics of skewness, kurtosis, min, max
Table 9: Test Statistics
Table 10: Test Statistics
Table 11: Test Statistics
Table 12: Test Statistics
Table 13: Students’ writing level and previous experience
Table 14: Results of the 26 questionnaire items
Table 15: Results of the first discussion board
Table 16: Results of the second discussion board
Table 17: Results of the third discussion board
Table 18: Results of the fourth discussion board
Table 19: Results of the fifth discussion board
Table 20: Results of the sixth discussion board
Table 21: Students’ opinions about the advantages of peer feedback on
discussion boards
Table 22: Students’ opinions about the disadvantages of peer feedback on
discussion boards
Table 23: Students’ opinions about the solutions to improve peer feedback on
discussion boards

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LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1 The components of the concept “attitudes” and their relationship with
gender and English learning (Eshghinejad, 2016)
Figure 2 The structure of a discussion board
Figure 3 The four steps of the treatment
Figure 4 The research design
Figure 5 The steps of data collection procedure
Figure 6 The steps of data analysis procedure

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ABSTRACT
Blended learning, a mix of traditional class and online class, facilitates the
synchronous (real-time interaction) and asynchronous (delayed interaction)
communication for teachers and students. Discussion board, a tool of a learning
management system built around a Moodle site, is widely used in the blended
learning mode as a platform for students to discuss with their friends. However,
there are very few studies investigate specifically peer feedback on discussion
boards as many of them are about blended learning in general or traditional peer
feedback in particular. This situation creates a research gap, which is an urgent
need to study about the combination between peer feedback and discussion
boards. This study examined the effects of peer feedback on discussion boards on
EFL undergraduate students’ writing performance. It also investigated students’
attitudes in terms of behavior, cognition and emotion. It was a study followed a
quasi- experimental design with one experimental group under the treatment and
one control group. The quantitative and qualitative data were collected from four
research instruments, namely the writing tests (pre-test and post-test), the
questionnaire, the interview, and the discussion boards. The findings show that
the experimental group has significantly increased their writing scores after the

treatment. In addition, they also show their positive attitudes towards peer
feedback on discussion boards and propose some solutions to enhance the
treatment. Maintaining students’ motivation during the course as one of the
pedagogical implications is crucial to assure the effectiveness of the treatment.
Keywords: attitudes, discussion boards, EFL, peer feedback, writing performance.

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CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
In English teaching and learning, writing is considered as the most challenging
and difficult skill for teachers and students. (McGuire, 2010). As a matter of fact,
writing is the last skill to be instructed according to the sequence Listening, Speaking,
Reading, and Writing in the audio-lingual method (Hubbard, 1983) because it is a
productive skill synthesizing the language knowledge gaining from the first three skills.
Through writing skills, students present the information they acquired from Listening,
Speaking, and Reading skills to construct mature language communication. (Do, T. X.
D. & Nguyen, T. H. N., 2016). Therefore, writing has its important effect on other skills.
Since writing has the ultimate position and receives a great deal of researchers’
concerns, it has not received proper attention so far due to subjective and objective
reasons from both the teachers and the students. Writing tasks tended to be the last
activity after teachers and students have passed other activities in the course books
(English Language Files as an example). As it is the last activity, writing tasks may be
treated as homework. Students might choose to do it or not to do it at home. Teachers
might not have enough time inside class or outside class to check students’ written
papers while they must teach many classes with many tasks making them busy like:
designing lesson plans, teaching, doing research, designing tests, becoming the
invigilators and test examiners. Apart from this, students also consider writing as the
toughest, the most boring and the most discouraging skills because they have to

dedicate their time in practicing writing. This thought may somehow prevent them from
learning writing skills effectively and efficiently. (Huynh, T. T. L., 2016). Although
writing is a tough skill, the survey of the Association of American Colleges and
Universities, quoted in the ETS report, realized that about 99% of academic staff from
433 institutions claimed that writing is among the critical intellectual skills for students.
In a traditional writing class, students often write their papers at home, then they
bring them to class with the hope that teachers will correct all the mistakes for them.
Next, the great amount of papers becomes a heavy burden for teachers. (Shokrpour,
Kheshavarz & Jafari, 2013). It seems to be very difficult for teachers to manage the time

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to correct all the students’ papers so that they could give immediate feedback.
Therefore, teachers tend to delay their feedback. (Lavolette, Polio & Kahng, 2015). At
that time, students might forget which mistakes they have committed. Although
teachers might give students detailed writing feedback, the issue that students do not
write their revised papers is popular. As a result, students could not make use of the
teacher feedback and might continue making the same writing mistakes in their papers.
Teachers may use peer feedback to supplement for traditional teacher feedback
by asking students to look at their friends’ drafts and correct the mistakes for
themselves. It can be conducted in pairs or groups, and students can only see and give
comments on several papers of their classmates. This somehow reduces the teachers’
workload, but it also has some problems, like the students’ preference of teacher
feedback, students’ anxiety about losing face, the quality of students’ comments, and
the time management in class. (Charoensuk, 2012)
Apart from conducting peer feedback in the classroom, educators can select an
alternative kind of writing feedback with the support of computer devices to replace the
disadvantages of the traditional ones. With the online peer feedback, teachers will save
time for the peer feedback activity in class because students can access the online class

to do this activity at any time they want. Students can give quality peer feedback to their
classmates when they have more time. Face-losing is no longer a problem when students
do not have to confront each other like in the traditional class. They only see their names
on the discussion boards, so they can give truthful comments for their classmates. It is
unlike in the traditional class when students may not feel comfortable when they work
with the classmates who are not their close friends.
It is believed that peer feedback on discussion boards may be contradictory to
the disadvantages of peer feedback because all the mistakes may be shown publicly.
Nevertheless, it may raise students’ awareness towards their writing mistakes, selfcorrect these mistakes, and enhance their writing level.
Following this current trend, the thesis will study peer feedback in the online
environment to contribute a small aspect in the diverse results of previous similar
studies. The first chapter will further elaborate this issue by discussing about the

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background, the research aims, the research questions, the originality, the limitation,
and the structure of the thesis.
1.1 Background to the study
1.1.1 The integration of Information and Communications Technology (ICT)
in English Language Teaching (ELT).
The trend of integrating ICT in ELT has changed the way of teaching writing
skills by providing to teachers many substitute options to correct students’ writing
mistakes in their online writing assignments such as using computer-mediated
corrective software like Criterion, Grammarly; Track changes in Microsoft Word, pdf
files; peer collaboration in Google Docs, Wikis, (Ur, 2012); or blended learning.
Blended learning, a mix of a traditional face-to-face class and a virtual online
class, is used to maximize the potential of learning inside and outside class. A Learning
Management System (LMS), the online part of blended learning has provided to
teachers a lot of tools such as blogs, wikis, and forums (discussion boards) to facilitate

students’ language learning. Blogs may be used for reflection, wikis for collaborative
activities and discussion boards for discussion as in the study of Miyazoe & Anderson,
(2012). Blended learning can also become the solution for a large class, teaching time
limitation, and the insufficient interaction among teacher and students and students with
students (Dewi, 2014). In this meaning, the teaching and learning can be extended
outside class in the form of distance education. (Nguyen, T. C. A., 2014).
However, these learning platforms also possess some disadvantages and
constraints. The use of computer-mediated corrective software is too expensive for
teachers if they want to apply it for small groups of students. The softwares like
Grammarly and Criterion are only available for teachers if their institutions purchase
them to use the Premium account as advertised in their websites. (According to
Grammarly’s websites on October 6th; the price of Grammarly service was $29.95 USD
per month). Wikis allow every student to correct the mistakes directly in their own
writings. Blogs somehow belong to private possession of each student. Track changes
allow students to write comments in bubbles to correct the mistakes on their peers’
writings, and students only do a simple job that is clicking to agree with the changes
provided in the Track changes bubbles.
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In the above applications such as computer-mediated corrective software, wikis,
blogs and track changes, students do not have many opportunities to give reasons for
any changes in their drafts. In Track changes, students can only view their writings in
the private file. In contrast, the use of peer feedback on discussion boards in teaching
writing skills grants students the chance to consult their friends’ writings, to evaluate
their friends, to explain for their revised drafts.
Most previous studies generally investigated blended learning without
specializing in any of its tools or investigated only about traditional feedback. The
researcher could find a great deal of online studies like them. However, there are very
few studies combine peer feedback and discussion boards. In addition, their research

designs did not require students to explain for the changes in their revised step.
Furthermore, it is still unclear about the effectiveness of discussion boards in teaching
writing, the way to use discussion boards appropriately, the cultural aspect in students’
perceptions because of the contradictory results yielded, the small scope, the limited
duration of treatment. Therefore, these issues create the gap for this study.
1.1.2 The situation of students’ writing performance in this study context
In Vietnamese EFL context, students’ writing problems derive from the late
exposure of writing skills and the highly emphasis on grammar from secondary school
to high school and even to tertiary study. According to the precedent years from 2006
to 2014, each English test of the university entrance examination usually consists of 80
multiple choice questions, which focuses on grammar, reading, vocabulary,
pronunciation without leaving any space for listening, speaking, or writing. Therefore,
teachers paid more attention to grammar-translation method to achieve the goal
“teaching to the test” and students concentrated in drilling the English grammar with
the expectation that they could enter their target universities. Students’ poor writing
performance was explained by the traditional usage of multiple choice test questions,
which do not express their true language competence. (Nguyen, N. A. T., 2016).
Although students have learned English from grade sixth to grade twelfth, they could
not produce good written texts due to the great emphasis on grammar, structural patterns
and error correction according to conventional high school education. (Dang, T. V. D.,
2014; Hoang, Y. P. & Nguyen, T. Q. P., 2016)
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From the past two years 2015 and 2016, paragraph writing has been added in the
content of the English test when the high school graduation examination and the
university entrance examination was combined into one examination. However,
grammar accuracy is still the core issue that students tend to look at in their paragraphs
and skip other writing elements such as organization, coherence and cohesion, lexical
resource, and grammatical range (structural variety). Furthermore, students also

experience high writing apprehension when they are required to produce their own
writing. The negligence of other writing criteria and the writing anxiety are two major
challenges preventing Vietnamese EFL students from improving their writing
performance. Therefore, these obstacles need to be overcome by finding an appropriate
treatment, and modern technology may become a potential platform to assist teachers
and students by changing their perception towards teaching and learning English
writing skills.
1.1.3 The combination of peer feedback and discussion boards in teaching
writing skills.
After detecting students’ writing problems, another question posing for EFL
researchers and educators is finding the effective online teaching practice in enhancing
students’ writing performance.
Discussion boards, or forums are the popular online platform for people to
present their viewpoints about a topic or an issue. Peer feedback relates to the action of
correcting or giving comments about a classmate’s work. The combination of peer
feedback and discussion boards in teaching writing skills become the treatment of the
study because discussion boards provide to students an online environment to exchange
their ideas, which is suitable for conducting peer feedback. Students can look at all the
writing drafts of their classmates and give remarks in this platform.
In this study, discussion boards are chosen because the researcher purposefully
wants students to discuss their classmates’ drafts to provide suggestions and arguments
for adopting or rejecting these suggestions. She also wants the students to self-correct
their writings from the comments below the writings. Students should not be directly
corrected in their writings like the cases of track changes and wikis. Moreover, the

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researcher would like to increase the voice of “shy” students in the traditional classroom
so that they can participate in doing peer feedback on discussion boards.

In many previous studies, the combination between peer feedback and discussion
boards in teaching writing skills has been widely applied in two popular forms. The first
type is the use of synchronous discussion boards, which means that teachers conduct a
writing class in a multimedia room or a lab room equipped with computers and the
Internet connection. Students will give comments on their peers’ writing works at the
same time in the online environment.
The second type is the application of asynchronous discussion boards. Students
are required to do this assignment at home by giving online comments on their peers’
writings at their own convenient time. In contrast to the former type of discussion board,
the latter type accepts the peer feedback not in the same time. Students can have more
time to think about their friends’ writings before giving quality peer feedback (Dewi,
2014), which can be more time-saving than the synchronous discussion boards if
students do not know what to comments, especially when their friends’ writings do not
have any grammar mistakes. For this purpose, the thesis explores the effectiveness of
asynchronous discussion boards rather than synchronous discussion boards.
Due to the lack of face-to-face interaction, sincere comments are expected to
make peer feedback become meaningful for students. As students may experience
writing apprehension for their mistakes, discussion boards provide a “safe”
environment for them by learning how to assess their friends (Song & Usaha, 2009).
Finally, the time in traditional class may not seem enough for the writing activities,
which is an ongoing process needing time to develop and make progress.
According to Hyland & Hyland (2006), computer-mediated peer feedback is
among many unsolved areas of feedback (teacher feedback, peer feedback, computermediated feedback), so the investigation of peer feedback on asynchronous discussion
boards also belongs to these research fields. In addition, many previous studies yielded
conflict results in terms of the experimental groups like the treatment has positive result
or has no effect on the students’ grades. The uncertainty in these studies’ outcome is
thought to have originated by lacking evidence to prove the appropriateness for the
application of such technical platforms in ELT. Moreover, few studies have investigated
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the use of peer feedback on discussion boards in teaching writing, especially in
Vietnamese context where English is taught as a foreign language. These issues create
the research gap, which is an urgent need to conduct this empirical study.
The rationale for conducting this research is because peer feedback has many
advantages. According to Charoensuk (2012), peer feedback motivated students to
invest more efforts to write, increase critical thinking skills and knowledge about
grammar and vocabulary. While in the teacher feedback, the teacher is the sole reader
of students; in the peer feedback, the classmates are also the readers. Thus, students
should be careful when they post their writings for the whole class to read and give
comments. Do, T. H. (2016) also stated that inspiring lessons and meaningful tasks are
the critical factor to help students attain their potential. Peer feedback on discussion
boards is believed to achieve this criterion. It compensates for the traditional writing
instruction by creating the learning environment for students to have model essays and
engage themselves in the activity according to the idea of Mc Kay (1984), quoted in
Do, T. H., 2016). Although the online assignment is independent work, students can
choose the essays they want to read. High proficiency students can develop critical
thinking skills and low-level students can benefit from the comments of their friends
(Dang, T. D. T., 2016). Students can find information from dictionaries and the Internet
and share their opinions on discussion boards. The treatment peer feedback on
discussion board is both the collaborative and corrective work for students. Students’
attention of their progress may be higher thanks to the scores they receive from their
revised paragraphs. (Nguyen, N. A. T., 2016).
1.2 Aims of the study
There are two main purposes in conducting this research. The former one is to
investigate the effectiveness of peer feedback on discussion boards on Vietnamese EFL
students’ writing performance in terms of 4 IELTS criteria: task achievement, coherence
and cohesion, lexical resource, grammatical range and accuracy. The latter one is to
explore students’ attitudes towards the use of peer feedback on discussion boards in
teaching writing skills in terms of its advantages, limitations and suggestions for

improvement. In other words, the aims of the study are to test the effectiveness of peer

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feedback on discussion boards as an effective teaching methodology to solve students’
writing problems.
1.3 Research questions
This research is carried out to answer these research questions:
1. To what extent does peer feedback on discussion boards improve EFL students’
writing performance?
2. What are students’ attitudes towards peer feedback on discussion boards?
1.4 Significance of the study
Since the nature of discussion boards is to facilitate discussion, it is widely used
in teaching speaking rather than teaching writing skills because students can present
their opinions, ideas about a variety of speaking topics. Therefore, few studies
investigated the use of discussion boards and comments in teaching writing skills,
especially in Vietnamese EFL context. To compensate for that research gap, this study
combines asynchronous discussion boards and peer feedback in teaching writing skills.
The significance of this study is expressed in its ability to address these abovementioned problems. Firstly, it focuses on investigating only discussion boards rather
than blended learning in general. Secondly, students not only type comments to suggest
corrections but they also give reasons for accepting or refusing peers’ suggestions in
their subsequent drafts. Finally, it also provides some information about the
effectiveness of discussion boards on students’ writing performance, emphasizes on the
cultural aspect in students’ opinions about this teaching practice and the way it should
be applied in teaching writing skills.
1.5 Scope of the study
To have a profound insight of the effects of peer feedback on discussion boards
on students’ writing performance, the researcher conducts a study with two English
major classes of Bachelor program at the University of Technology and Education of

Ho Chi Minh City (HCMUTE) during one semester (15 weeks).
The researcher chooses the University of Technology and Education because this
university is currently using Moodle LMS. Students major in English are selected
because they are learning English writing skills in their training program. The researcher
omitted the option of In-serviced students because they do not have much time to do
8


the online assignment and they may not like to do the pair work or group work.
Therefore, students major in English may be a reasonable choice for this study.
As mentioned above, this study focuses on asynchronous discussion boards
because students may need more time to read and to give quality comments for their
friends at their own convenience of online time. Therefore, the information exchange is
limited in only text comments on the discussion boards so that students can read the
writing drafts, write comments in formal academic English, and read comments. The
selection of text-based comments is suitable to the research because its focus is
investigating the effectiveness of discussion boards in teaching writing skills.
1.6 Outline of the thesis
This thesis consists of 5 chapters:
Chapter 1 provides an overview of the study with the background, the research
purposes, the research questions, the significance and the scope.
Chapter 2 analyzes the literature review related to the study including the definitions
of terminologies and the review of previous studies conducted in foreign context and
Vietnamese context.
Chapter 3 presents the methodology of the study. It covers the research design, the
research site, the participants, the research instruments, the data collection and the data
analysis procedure.
Chapter 4 clarifies the results of the study by dealing with the data analysis, discussions
of results, and findings.
Chapter 5 summarizes the conclusion, some pedagogical implications, limitations of

the study and proposes suggestions for future research relating to the use of technology
in teaching English writing skills.

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CHAPTER 2
LITERATURE REVIEW
2.1 Definitions of terms
2.1.1 Peer feedback and peer feedback on writing:
Based on its emphasis aspects, peer feedback has many terms like peer review, peer
response, peer critiquing, peer editing. (Chaorensuk, 2012). The reason for its different
name depends on the nature of the context it is used. According to Charoensuk (2012),
peer feedback related to “the act of students giving comments for their classmates’
writing, while peer response related to the content, and peer editing refers to the
correction of grammatical structures.”
Nicol, Thomson & Breslin (2014) defined peer review as “a reciprocal process
whereby students produce feedback reviews on the work of peers and receive feedback
reviews from peers on their own work.”
According to some authors (Dang, T. D. T., 2016; Hoang, Y. P. & Nguyen, T. Q.
P.,2016), peer feedback can be defined as the support and the negotiation between
students and their classmates by presenting the written texts evaluating peer text, giving
feedback and receiving feedback. Wakabayashi, 2013 defined the feedback as the
reader’s input to the writer to provide information for revision.
In his paper, McCarthy (2017) differentiated peer feedback and peer assessment by
giving the Topping (2000)’s quotation. The former is “the process of students’ giving
comments about their friends’ papers” while the latter is “evaluating and giving their
friends’ a grade”. Yu & Lee (2016) quoted Liu & Hansen (2002) the definition of peer
feedback as “the use of learners as sources of information and interactants for each other
in such a way that learners assume roles and responsibilities normally taken on by a

formally trained teacher, tutor, or editor in commenting on and critiquing each other’s
drafts in both written and oral formats in the process of writing”. In their opinion, the
term peer feedback consists of the product and process of the whole activity.
Like feedback, peer feedback also has the important role in helping students’
recognition of grammatical errors, writing focus, and their response to the correction
process. (Trinh, N. T., 2014). According to Kumar & Stracke (2011), (quoted in Vergara

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& Lee, 2014), feedback support students in the realization of the gap between their
current and design competence.
In this study, peer feedback is the act of typing and posting comments on the
discussion boards to give remarks about the classmates’ essays. The current platform is
the discussion board and it mainly belongs to collaborative learning and communication
among peers, hence, the term peer feedback is the most accurate one to be chosen.
The researcher used the term “Peer feedback on discussion boards” because she
chose discussion boards as the online platform for her study. Peer feedback is the action
of students giving comments for their classmates’ writing drafts. In the study context,
the researcher wanted to emphasize the treatment by using the term “peer feedback on
discussion boards”, which means that the peer feedback was conducted on discussion
boards, not the peer feedback in traditional face-to-face class. Peer feedback on
discussion boards is totally different from peer feedback on blogs or peer feedback on
Facebook and peer feedback on wikis.
Apart from the online platform, the term “peer feedback on discussion board” is
used to refer to the two actions that students do to give their comments about their
friends’ online essays (posts on the thread). The first action is giving the peer comments,
which mean that students give comments for their friends’ essays. The second action is
giving the responsive comments to reply their friends’ peer comments about their
essays. With these definitions, peer feedback is conducted in two-way between the

reviewers and the writers of the essays. They might keep giving responses about the
essays until they found out that the essays’ problems were solved. It is also parallel with
Li (2010), quoted in McCarthy (2017) that students acted as “assessors” and “assesses”.
Assessors are the students giving comments and assesses are the students receiving
comments and make some modifications in their writing.
As discussion board has two types: synchronous (real-time interaction among
students) and asynchronous (students can do the activity in their own pace) (Jose &
Abidin, 2016), the researcher focused on the latter form because the former form could
not be conducted due to the lack of facilities inside the current classroom and the limited
classtime that the research was provided by the institution. Furthermore, students did
not have enough time to write a complete essay and conduct a traditional face-to-face
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peer feedback. Those were the reasons why asynchronous discussion boards are more
prominent than synchronous discussion boards. Therefore, asynchronous discussion
board is appropriate for learners to have more time to think and write peer feedback for
their classmates’ essays.
2.1.2 Writing performance
According to Chomsky (1965), the term performance means “the production of
actual utterances” and it involves “doing something with the language”. Therefore,
writing performance means students produce their real and actual piece of writing, how
they use the English language to write their writing products.
The term “writing performance” was assessed by many writing criteria:
According to the old way of assessing writing skills, the Faculty of Foreign
Languages, University of Technology and Education used a set of criteria, namely:
(1) An introduction paragraph with a hook, a background, and a thesis statement (1.5
marks)
(2) Three body paragraphs with a topic sentence, specific supporting sentences, and
a concluding sentence for each (3 marks)

(3) A conclusion with a summary of the main points, a prediction, or a
recommendation (1 mark)
(4) Unity and coherence in each paragraph and within the whole essay (2 marks)
(5) Correct use of grammar and vocabulary (2.5 marks)
In the semester 2016-2017, the Faculty adopted the 4 criteria of IELTS with an
emphasis in analytic scoring, not holistic scoring like the previous one. The shift
between using the old way of assessing writing skills and the new way mark an
importand transition or milestone in connecting the academic knowledge of English
writing skills with the real IELTS test.
The IELTS task 2 Writing band descriptions:
According to the IELTS task 2 Writing band descriptions, British Council divided
the writing assessment into 4 criteria, namely:
Criterion 1: Task achievement
Criterion 2: Coherence and cohesion
Criterion 3: Lexical resource
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Criterion 4: Grammatical range and accuracy
Criterion 1, task achievement, means to what extent students attain the task
requirement. It is the standard to examine that students’ essays do not go off topic. It
also means that students have written enough elements of the essays, namely the
introduction, the body and the conclusion. This criterion is about the development of
ideas in the essays, whether the ideas are fully developed or not.
Criterion 2, coherence and cohesion, is about the connection of ideas in the students’
essays, whether the former sentences have a smooth flow of ideas in the latter sentences
or not. Students can use pronoun reference and sentence connectors to achieve the
coherence and cohesion, but abusing these sign-posts or using less transitions might not
be encouraged by the IELTS examiners.
Criterion 3, lexical resource, is used to measure the abundant of students’ vocabulary

accumulation. If students use less common and academic words with correct usage and
register, their essays might be graded with higher points than the essays that only use
common words.
Criterion 4, grammatical range and accuracy is used to assess the level of various
kinds of sentences that students used, namely the simple sentences, the compound
sentences, the complex sentences, or the compound-complex sentences. The more
accurate and complicated the sentence structures that students use, the higher bands of
scores that they achieve. Apart from these 4 basic sentence structures, students can use
various grammatical structures to create the interesting feature for their essays and to
reduce the monotonous of the repetitive sentence structures. The accuracy is the
accurate grammar usage, or the precise language use of students in their essays. The
more accurate the grammar in students’ essays, the higher scores they will receive.
The appendix will provide more detailed information about the assessment with the
requirement for each band scores.
According to the Faculty of Foreign Languages, University of Technical
Education, the 4 IELTS criteria was divided into 5 criteria, namely the task
achivement, coherence-cohesion, lexical resource, structure variety (grammatical
range), and grammatical accuracy. Each of the five criteria is considered equally with

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