The Effect of Peer, Self, and Traditional Assessment on Iranian EFL Learners’ L2 Reading Comprehension

Abstract

This study investigated the impact of peer, self, and traditional (or teacher) assessment on improving EFL learners' reading comprehension. To this aim, 77 Iranian students from a private institute were selected as homogeneous from a population pool of 102 volunteers based on their performance on a standard English proficiency test (Nelson, 2001). They were randomly divided into three experimental groups and subsequently exposed to the research treatment. The three groups received peer, self, and traditional assessment on second language (L2) reading comprehension. Then, the reading comprehension achievement test was given to the students in the three groups to find out their reading comprehension ability after the treatment. Statistical analyses of the results revealed that the peer-assessment group significantly outperformed the traditional assessment group in terms of L2 reading comprehension. The results also showed that that there exist no meaningful differences in the performance of the other two groups on comprehension measures. Hence, the findings of this study indicated that utilizing peer-assessment can be influential in language learning in general and L2 reading comprehension in particular. Results may also have important implications for foreign language syllabus designers and language instructors as well