Abstract:

With ICT-mediated participatory teaching approaches and online peer feedback being imperative in the development of higher education today, this study aims to conduct a quantitative investigation into the effect of fair and/or effective online peer feedback in an English for Specific Purposes (ESP) blended course. In the ESP literature, the vast population of which is not chartered, most samples are drawn from small numbers of postgraduate students. In this study, four raters ranked the feedback received and given by all 100 undergraduate participants and assessed students’ corresponding entries in an attempt to find a correlation between performance and frequency. There were six groups identified including: G1; Those that received no feedback, G2, Those that received fair and effective feedback by peers, G3; Those that received fair & and effective feedback by the teacher, G4; Those that gave no feedback; G5; Those that gave fair and effective feedback to peers, G6; Those that gave fair and effective feedback to peers and received fair and effective feedback by peers. Whilst our null hypothesis was that Group 6 should outperform the others, we noticed that Group 5 showed marginal precedence signifying theoretical and practical implications for the instructional practices in higher education.

Keywords:

Peer feedback, collaborative writing, blended learning, ICT-mediated participatory teaching, ESP.