Writing in Special Needs Contexts
PEER FEEDBACK IN AN FL CONTEXT – WHO HELPS BETTER: AN L1 OR AN FL PEER?
Esther Breuer
Cologne University, Cologne, Germany
One of the major goals of Bologna was to foster intercultural exchange by making student exchange easier. However, L2 students often meet the problem of having different views on academic genre than is practiced at their guest universities (Siepmann, 2006). Since they tend to stay inter alia , they often get feedback to their academic texts exclusively from other L2 students. This is not negative per se (see Hülmbauer, 2007) but L2 peers may not be able to evaluate texts in an appropriate way because their language competencies are not good enough, or because they are not profound in the target audience’s understanding of the academic genre themselves (Horowitz, 1986, Keh, 1990). In order to analyse whether there are differences in the type and the effect of feedback given in different settings, we set up a casestudy and compared the feedback that L2 writers received from either an L1 peer tutor, an L2 peer tutor or an L2 group of peer students. We found that the best feedback constellation was L2–L2 in that a real discussion came up about topic, content and style, whereas the other settings concentrated on language (L2 peer group) or lingutistic and formal matters (L1 peer), due to the different understandings of the participants’ roles in the different conditions. As a result, the revision also was most successful in the L2L2 condition. This means that peer tutors in writing centres need to be trained to adjust their feedback giving to the special demands of L2 students in order to help them effectively.
References
Horowitz, D.M. (1986). What Professors Actually Require: Academic Tasks for the ESL Classroom. TESOL Quarterly 20(3), pp.: 445462.
Hülmbauer, C. (2007). ‘You moved, aren’t?’: The relationship between lexicogrammatical correctness and communicative effectiveness in English as a lingua franca. Vienna English Working Papers 16 (2), 3–35.
Keh, C.L. (1990). Feedback in the writing process: a model and methods for implementation. ELF Journal 44(4), pp.: 294–304.
Siepmann, D. (2006). Academic Writing and Culture: An Overview of Differences between English, French and German. Meta L1 1, pp.: 131–150.