Effects of Self- and Peer-Editing on Iranian TEFL Postgraduate Students’ L2 Writing

Abstract

Peer and self-correction of writing are considered to be two important types of corrective feedback. The present study was an attempt to investigate the possible role that self- and peer-editing may have on term paper writing by Iranian Teaching English as a foreign language postgraduate students. To this end, from the population of male and female postgraduate students majoring at TEFL at Islamic Azad University, Khorasgan branch a sample of 100 MA and PhD students, 50 each, were selected using a convenient sampling method. The participants at each level were divided into two groups. Task two of the IELTS academic writing module was run as a pre-test to gauge the homogeneity of the participants in terms of their writing performance. In the treatment phase of the study, half of the MA participants were asked to edit their own essays for 13 consecutive sessions. They were explicitly told to introduce changes at the level of punctuation, coherence and cohesion as well as grammar and vocabulary. Afterwards the two MA writing classes sat for a post-test. The procedure for the PhD candidates was partially different in that the term papers of the PhD participants were used as the corpus for the targeted data. While the term papers of 25 PhD candidates were revised and edited by themselves, those of the rest, were scored and edited by several PhD holders. Subsequently, the scores of the participants in both MA and PhD groups were compared. The results provided by paired sample t-tests revealed that exposure to self-editing instruction can significantly improve the writing ability of postgraduate TEFL students. Notably, these findings may have practical implications for those involved in English teaching and research in general and those who have their hands on teaching writing in particular.