Understanding Chinese EFL Students' Participation in Group Peer Feedback of L2 Writing: A Sociocultural and Activity Theory Perspective.

摘要

While research on peer feedback in L2 writing has proliferated over the past two decades, not much is known about how EFL writers, driven by their motives and situated within their social, cultural and historical contexts, participate in group peer feedback of L2 writing. To fill such an important void, the present study investigates six Chinese EFL university students' participation in group peer feedback activities of L2 writing from a sociocultural and activity theory perspective. Based on sociocultural theory and activity theory in particular, the present study proposes a tentative group peer feedback activity system model and explores Chinese EFL writers' motives for participating in group peer feedback, how their motives influence group interaction and text revisions, and how they employ mediating strategies to facilitate group interaction and realize their motives during group peer feedback activities.;The study adopts a case study approach with a multiple-case design and collects multiple sources of data including video recordings of peer feedback sessions, semi-structured interviews, stimulated recalls, and drafts of student texts. Six Chinese EFL university students were selected through purposive sampling to participate in the study. Data analyses indicate that EFL students' group peer feedback activities are driven and defined by their motives and mediated by their social, cultural and historical contexts. The findings revealed four major types of student motives for group peer feedback activities in the writing classroom: (1) feedback-giving and the learning process; (2) feedback-receiving and the learning product; (3) fixing errors in writing; and (4) getting the job done, which were shaped by a myriad of individual and sociocultural factors such as students' personal belief systems, their secondary education experiences and the exam-oriented learning culture and education system. The study also found that student motives for peer feedback have great influences on students' stances for group peer feedback and the patterns of group interaction, as well as the text revisions. Driven by different motives, the students were involved in different peer feedback systems in which they took different stances for peer feedback and interacted differently with their group members, even though some of them were working in the same group and of similar English proficiency level. The study also reveals four major types of mediating strategies in peer feedback activities of L2 writing: artefact-mediated, rule-mediated, community-mediated, and division of labour-mediated strategies. The six students made use of these mediating strategies at different levels to realize their motives in the peer feedback activities.;Informed by the peer feedback activity system and the major findings of the present study, a tentative model to conceptualize the effective peer feedback activity in the EFL writing classroom has been proposed, which serves as a tentative conceptual and pedagogical model for research and practice in peer feedback of L2 writing. This study contributes new knowledge to the field by relating students' motives to other key elements in peer feedback such as mediating strategies, peer stances, group interaction and student revisions of L2 writing, yielding a deepened understanding of students' participation in and engagement with peer feedback in EFL writing.