Abstract:

Currently developing academic writing skills acquires urgent imperative for professional competitiveness of tertiary education graduates. Extensive modelling, a scaffold of prompts and explanations, active reflection and participation, in-process support encourage the process. Apprenticeship models enable learners to resort to English as a tool in the process of becoming self-regulatory. The authors consider how the process-genre approach helps learners develop strategies for self-correction and regulation. The process-genre approach to teaching technical writing justifies the relevance of feedback. The key issue of concern is a sustainable peer feedback and its potential in enhancing academic literacy and identity of students at Russian higher education settings. Sufficient feedback along with individual attention results in improving technical writing. The paper provides an analysis of peer feedback as an input carried out by peers in English for Specific Purposes (ESP) classrooms. We discuss two kinds of peer feedback: quantitative and qualitative based on specially developed tests and questionnaires. This allows evaluating the students’ level of both linguistic and academic skills in the technical discourse.

The conducted study demonstrates the following qualitative findings:
(1) the feedback effectiveness is sensitive to the students` motivation level,
(2) the students’ awareness of pragmatic-discursive and language variables,
(3) the enhancement of editing and proofreading competences,
(4) the upgrading the self-regulatory abilities.

The qualitative findings also show the improvement in the scores obtained after doing the course final tests. Extensive modelling of target genre can facilitate students’ correct technical text writing. Using feedback in revision helps students gain deeper understanding of what is required in the particular genre text, confidence in their professional development and motivation, and finally making them better technical writers.

Keywords:

English for Specific Purposes (ESP), academic technical writing, peer feedback, learning strategies.