Student engagement with peer feedback in L2 writing: Insights from reflective journaling and revising practices

The torrent of research into peer feedback in academic writing in recent years has largely overlooked student revision process – how individual students engage with this feedback to revise their texts and why certain changes are made in their texts. In other words, the cognitive dimension of student engagement with peer feedback in revision is little known. Drawing on multiple student drafts, peer feedback on these drafts, reflective journals and interviews with students, this study examines how two L2 students engage with peer feedback to conduct revisions. We found that the two participants differed considerably in their revision processes and identified two patterns of engagement: deep engagement, characterized by self-regulated revising practices, and surface engagement, concerned with other-regulated revision operations. We were not only interested in students’ revision operations in their drafts, but also their reflective practices in their reflective journals that their teacher had assigned. The study suggests that effective student engagement with peer feedback largely depends on how they make use of cognitive and metacognitive strategies in the revision process. The study recommends that teachers seek to provide instructional scaffolding to facilitate student cognitive engagement with peer feedback on L2 writing.