Applying Direct Peer Feedback to Foster Vocational School Students’

English Writing Performance

Sujito Sujito

, Emilia Yunita

, Trisno Tunggal Rahayu Wilujeng

, Rina Widjajanti

and Wildan Muttaqin

IAIN Surakarta, Jl Pandawa 9, Surakarta, Indonesia

Universitas Kanjuruhan Malang, Jl. Supriadi 48 Malang, Indonesia

MAN 3, Jl. Bandung 7, Malang,Indonesia

sujito.team@gmail.com

Keywords: Direct peer feedback, writing performance, vocational students.

Abstract: By expecting to give theoretical and practical contribution to English as Vocational Purposes (EVP) as part

of English as Special Purposes (ESP) in vocational high schools, this study is conducted with an aim at

determining whether there is significant difference between vocational students’ writing performance treated

using direct peer feedback, teacher feedback and no specific feedback. This study uses a quasi-experimental

design in which three assigned groups as experimental and control groups are given direct peer feedback

contrasted to teacher feedback and non feedback application. Inter-rater scoring rubric using Jacob’s ESL

Writing Assessment considering Language Use, Mechanic and Rhetoric as aspects is used to score students’

writing performance. Research findings shows that there is significant difference between students’ writing

performance taught using direct peer feedback compared from students’ writing performance using teacher

feedback and conventional with no special feedback instruction. It is also found that direct peer feedback is

even more effective than teacher feedback.

1 INTRODUCTION

The demands for writing in academic areas is

increasing because the impact of globalization. One

of that demands is in vocational schools. Vocational

schools in Indonesia are growing rapidly. The rapid

growth of vocational schools is not only due to the

enormous support from the government, but also

because of the industrial need for the graduates of

vocational schools in the present time. One of the

skills a vocational school graduate must have is good

writing skills. In vocational schools English is given

as English as Vocational Purposes (EVP) as part of

English as Specific Purposes (ESP) (Widodo, 2016;

Hua and Beverton, 2013). One of the English

language materials given is writing lessons. Because

of the importance of writing lessons for vocational

school students, it is significantly urgent to find an

effective teaching innovative writing for them. The

character of the vocational school students is always

learning and working in teams or groups. For that

need, it is urgent to study about writing teaching

techniques that fit with this character. One of the

teaching techniques of writing that suits that character

is peer feedback (Woo, Chu and Li, 2013).

Writing is very complicated skill to learn. It

involves a complex cognitive activity in which the

writer should be able to organize some specialized

skills at the same time, such as content, format,

sentence structure, vocabulary, punctuation, spelling,

and letter formation. Those are the challenge for

teachers to get the success of increasing the students’

writing ability. Process of teaching writing consists of

four basic stages: they are planning, drafting,

revising, and editing (Richard and Renandya, 2002).

The fourth stage revision is not a simply activity of

checking language errors, it has a big effect for

appearing the better writing product.

In revision process, there is feedback that leads

students to revise their writing product. Feedback is

necessary because it can inform the students of their

weaknesses and tell the teachers about the

effectiveness of their teaching. Feedback is defined

information on performance which affects

subsequent performance by influencing students’

attention to particular matters so that those matters

undergo a change in the subsequent performance

Sujito, S., Yunita, E., Wilujeng, T., Widjajanti, R. and Muttaqin, W.

Applying Direct Peer Feedback to Foster Vocational School Students’ English Writing Performance.

In Proceedings of the Annual Conference on Social Sciences and Humanities (ANCOSH 2018) - Revitalization of Local Wisdom in Global and Competitive Era, pages 335-339

ISBN: 978-989-758-343-8

335

(Haoucha, 2012). Generally, there are three types of

feedback: self-monitored feedback, peer feedback

and teacher-student feedback. Traditionally, teachers

are the only one who provides feedback to students’

writing. Then, peer feedback was introduced as a new

strategy to developed students’ writing performance

and it became an important role in writing classroom.

Ellis (2008) proposes six strategies for providing

feedback on writing performance, they are: direct

feedback, indirect feedback, meta-linguistic

feedback, focus and unfocused feedback, electronic

feedback, and reformulation feedback. This study

focuses on investigating the first category that is

direct feedback. Birk (2007) found that using peer

feedback the students began to recognize problems in

their peers’ writing and began to recognize the same

problems in their own. Later, Yu (2013) finds peer

feedback helpful for their students to be aware of the

common errors in their writing, learnt from their

peer’s writing, raised the audience’s awareness,

enhanced their own writing quality, stirred self-

reflections, and promoted interest and motivation in

L2 writing.

From the above rationales there is still a gap

between the facts of the importance of teaching

writing in vocational school, the advantage using

direct peer feedback technique (Nelson and Schunn,

2009) and the need to combine the two. Therefore,

this study aiming to identify whether there is any

significant difference of vocational high school

students’ writing performance treated using direct

peer feedback and students’ writing performance

treated using conventional method is really in need to

bridge the gap.

2 METHOD

2.1 Participants

Four vocational high schools located in Malang

district, East Java Province, participated in this study.

Thirty five students randomly selected from every

three vocational high schools completed in 10

effective meetings preceded by pre-test, followed

with the instructional program as treatment and ended

with the post-test. A group given peer feedback was

as experimental group. As control groups, two groups

consisting of 35 students of every group were given

teacher feedback and no special feedback technique

in instruction. These three groups did not differ

significantly from the dropouts with respect to age or

all pre-test measures, p values > 0.10.

2.2 Procedure and Assessment

Following the completion of the pre-test, the students

were assigned randomly to the instruction group.

Students in were taught in groups of 10 meetings.

There were 2 lessons per week for a total of 5 weeks.

Each lesson lasted for 90 min. The instruction used

for this study as treatment was mainly process writing

to promote the participants’ peer feed-back giving. It

was process writing approach with some steps in

which the step of peer feedback was intensified. For

the two control groups, one group was given with

teacher feedback, whereas another was given with

conventional instruction with no special feedback.

The students in experimental group were not only

as writers but also as feedback providers through their

peer’s writing product. The researcher gave the

students peer editing worksheet. It was also suggested

by Gebhard (1996) that teachers should provide

students guidelines or a short list of questions for

giving feedback. Peer editing worksheet would lead

them to evaluate the peer’s writing product.

This research also employed written test in the

form of writing prompt as one of the instruments to

obtain the data of the students’ achievement in

developing argumentative composition. The subjects

were asked to write an argumentative composition

using topic that has been determined. This test was

administered for 100 minutes to the subjects. Within

that time duration, the subjects are expected to finish

writing an argumentative composition containing

around 500 words. To score the students’

compositions, a ready-made scoring guide called ESL

Composition Profile. Inter-rater reliability were used

in this study instead of intra-rater reliability since the

last one is usually applied by a classroom teachers

who asses their own students for grading purpose.

Therefore, to the reliability scores, this study

employed two raters.

3 RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

The following is testing the effect of peer feed-back,

teacher feed-back and no special feed-back on

subjects’ writing achievement. The purpose of the

analysis in this section is to determine whether there

is any effect of applying three different feed-back

applications on subjects’ writing achievement across

study specifications.

Table 1 gives a description that the F-ratio for

teaching technique is 6.437 with the degrees of

freedom 2. The P-value is .002. This research uses

significance level .05 (α = .05). It can be interpreted

ANCOSH 2018 - Annual Conference on Social Sciences and Humanities

336

that there is significant different mean score of the

students’ writing achievement after being taught

using teacher feed-back peer feed-back and no special

feed-back technique. Therefore, it can be concluded

that there is significant different effect of applying

three different kinds of feed-back techniques on the

vocational students’ achievement in making

composition.

Table 1: Tests of between-subjects effects.

Source

Type III Sum

of S

uares Df

Mean

uare F Si

Corrected Model

6799.396(a) 8 849.925 11.346 .000

Intercept

1278166.44 1

1278166

.404

17062.

092

.000

Feed-back techs

964.391 2 482.195 6.437 .002

Voc. Study Specs

543.163 2 271.581 3.625 .028

Feed backs * Study

Specs

5291.843 4

1322.96

17.660 .000

Error

19552.200 261 74.913

Total

1304518.000 270

Corrected Total

26351.596 269

a R Squared = .258 (Adjusted R Squared = .235).

From the result of analysis of estimated marginal

means, as shown in Table 2, the rank of the three

groups is known. The highest mean score of writing

achievement is achieved by the group of students

given peer feed-back. The second position is

achieved by the group of students taught using

teacher feed-back, whereas, the lowest position is

achieved by the students given non feed-back writing.

Table 2: Estimated marginal means.

Teaching

Writing

Orientation Mean

Std.

Erro

95% Confidence

Interval

Lower

Boun

Upper

Boun

1=Teacher

Feed Back

Writin

66.700 .912 64.904 68.496

2=Peer Feed-

Back Writing

71.283 .912 69.487 73.080

3=No Specific

Feed Back

Writing

68.428 .912 66.631 70.224

The result of this study is relevant with the result

found by Hashemnezhad (2012). He revealed that

feedback in the form of direct feedback was more

beneficial than indirect feedback especially for

proficient learners. Direct feedback can give

spontaneous response. The suggestion given with

feedback can be spontaneously responded by the

students that result in revision of the error quickly.

Besides, direct feedback has possibility to be

confirmed. Sometimes the feedback given is not

always understood easily. It needs confirmation.

Direct feed eliminates the gap between the time

needed to make confirmation and the response to

make revision. Therefore, direct peer feedback has

really can give many advantages and can be claimed

as the effective method in teaching writing.

Moreover, the researcher also found four

advantages during implemented direct peer feedback

as a method in teaching and learning writing. They

are building learning community in the classroom,

negotiation possibility, building higher accountability

and finding different perspectives. As Hairston

(1999) proposed, peer feedback can build a leaning

community in the classroom. When the students

exchanged and shared their ideas with their peers by

negotiating about the feedback given, the students

could learn from each other and they could build a

higher level of accountability to submit a well-written

product to the teacher. Additionally, Spear (1988)

finds that while interaction helps students to share

ideas, communicate meaningfully, and obtain

different perspectives on their writing, there are a

number of factors that are potential inhibitors of

successful peer discussion.

As shown in Table 2, the writing performance of

the students given peer feedback is better than the

writing performance of the students without peer

feedback. Even, it is still better than the writing

performance of the students given teacher feedback.

The finding of this study confirms what Chen (2010)

and Sashok (2008) propose that direct peer feedback

Applying Direct Peer Feedback to Foster Vocational School Students’ English Writing Performance

337

helped the students become more critical in analyzing

and evaluating their peer’s writing product. It is in

line with Topping (2007) and Williams (2005)

stating that peer feedback not only helped students

improving their writing skills, but it also enhanced

their critical thinking and reading and at the same

time motivated them to write.

Another advantage of direct peer feedback in

writing is about the comfort and easiness of the

students in engaging mutual criticism and reciprocal

information. They indicated that it was easier to talk

with friends than teacher. To the friends they could

say whatever they wanted. Although it seems about

the psychological reason, but it really affect their

writing performance. The data as described in Table

2 empirically shows that direct peer feedback had a

positive effect in social aspect hence increase the

students’ writing performance.

Another reason about why direct peer feed gives

advantages to students hence increases significantly

their writing performance is concerning with

awareness of their error, learning from their peer and

self-reflection. Those three reasons affect not only to

psychological but also empirical experience to the

students. As proposed by Yu (2013) peer feedback is

helpful for their students to be aware of the common

errors in their writing, learnt from their peer’s writing,

raised the audience’s awareness, enhanced their own

writing quality, stirred self-reflections, and promoted

interest and motivation in L2 writing. What has been

proposed by Yu is empirically proved in this research.

When the students evaluated their peer’s writing

product, they automatically read all the paragraphs.

By reading their peer’s writing product, they got new

knowledge to improve their writing product such as

different writing style, points of views, vocabulary,

etc. The improvement was clearly showed in every

assignment. The first assignment (pre-test) until the

last assignment (post-test) showed that the students

writing style increased. They used variants

vocabulary to describe the topic well, and the

grammatical error was reduced. It was confirmed by

Rollinson (2005) that by reading the writing task of

their classmate, it can stimulate students to put more

effort to write and it encourages them to write more

and learn to improve their stories. Direct peer

feedback reduced the teacher’s workload in providing

feedback. It meant that the teacher could avoid time

consuming due to the students provided feedback on

what their peers writing product. By using direct peer

feedback as a method in teaching writing, it helped

the researcher as a teacher to correct all the students’

writing product quickly without spending more time

and energy. Therefore, direct peer feedback was not

only effective but also efficient as a method in

teaching writing.

In this study, the major feedback providers were

the students, and the researcher as a teacher still had

a big role in teaching learning process. Considering

teacher’s workload reduced, the teacher has enough

time to evaluate the students’ writing product and

take the conclusion of why the students make

mistakes. Then, the researcher discussed with the

students in the next meeting about their mistakes in

order to avoid the mistakes happened again. As

William cited by Nuraeni (2013) mentioned that

feedback without explanation or discussion from or

between teacher and students would not bring

significant positive effect toward students’ writing. In

this study, it was proved that the students did not

repeat the same mistakes. It could be seen of their

post-test score which increased. In this study the

researcher as a teacher not only explained about

descriptive text but also became a facilitator. Being

facilitator meant the researcher gave motivation to the

students to be good writers, reminded them to avoid

the same mistake, and gave appreciation when they

could improve their writing performance. Even

though, it was a simple activity but it could influence

their motivation to be a good writer (Barkaoui, 2007).

In summary, direct peer feedback was the

effective method used in teaching and learning

writing. This method not only increased the students’

writing score but also gave some advantages for the

students themselves in learning writing and also the

teacher in teaching writing.

4 CONCLUSIONS

From the pedagogical point of view, these findings

are good news for the students and teachers. By

providing direct peer feedback as a method in

teaching and learning writing, the students’ writing

score who are treated using direct peer feedback

better than students’ writing score who are not treated

using conventional method. Additionally, direct peer

feedback also bring the advantages for the students

and the teacher; it made students active in the

classroom, helped the students more critical in

analyzing and evaluating their peer’s writing product,

made the students got new knowledge to improve

their writing quality product, reduced teacher’s

workload in providing feedback.

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