INVESTIGATING PEER COMMENTS OF NOVICE REVIEWERS

Revision is an important writing process. The high quality of comments leads to great improvement in writing. There are many studies investigating the effectiveness of teacher and peer comments. The findings from many studies showed that students could benefits from peer comments. However, these studies focused on reviewers who had experiences in writing, and/or were proficient in the language used in writing tasks. This study examined types of comments provided by novice reviewers, amounts and types of revisions, and also attitudes of writers towards comments from novice peers. The participants of the current study were twenty university students who enrolled a fundamental writing course. They studied English as their second language and had limited experiences in writing paragraphs in English. The data was collected through the analysis of students' comments and work and a survey. The implications of the findings of this study are also discussed.