Peer Corrective Feedback on L2 Writing: Does It Help Improve Written Accuracy and L2 Explicit Knowledge Over Time?

The purpose of the study was to explore the effect primarily of written corrective feedback (WCF) provided by peers on enhancing learners' internalization/retention of grammatical structures and further of task type in determining learners' engagement with WCF. Participants in the study were a group of EFL students (n = 36) who completed a number of controlled and free-writing tasks and provided metalinguistic feedback on the errors in the tasks accomplished by their peers. The grammatical structures, which the participants were to focus on included primarily errors of verb use and after some sessions of receiving WCF from their teacher, errors of noun, pronoun, and article use as well. The results of RM ANOVA suggested significant improvement in not only the accuracy with which learners used these structures after involvement in peer WCF, but also in the precision of the metalinguistic feedback they provided. (C) Association of Applied Linguistics. All rights reserved.