Ways of Responding to Student Writing: Teacher vs Peer Response

Ukraine, ID Výzvy2016-478;         Responding to student writing presupposes certain degrees of two notions: “evaluation” and “assessment”, whether they include response and judgment and whether or not the response leads to a grade. Thus, this paper will look at the process of responding to student writing from at least two perspectives: a teacher’s perspective (who grades writing papers) and student’s perspective (who can give peer-evaluation). Based on the idea, that response to writing parallels the writing process ( starting with idea generation and ending with revision), response roles of a teacher, a student and peers fall under the following characteristics: student’s revision, teacher’s intervention, peers’ social context. Though establishing viable peer response can be rather challenging in EFL classroom, it can provide a context for a variety of thinking, writing, talking, learning, and different communicative activities. On the other hand, peer reviews reinforce the basic values of classroom community and, on the other, students learn to practice “the language of response” that thee can later use to articulate ideas in their own writing.

Keywords: Writing evaluation and assessment, peer-review response, teacher’s response.