To what extent do students give peer feedback?
47 revealed some significant improvement on their composition, for example, the
improvement on grammar and organization. Finally, based on the result, it was found that peer feedback should be
considered to be implemented in writing class. Students believed that they could obtain many benefits by doing peer feedback in writing class and improve the
quality of their writing. As stated in chapter II, perceiving peer feedback positively, the students will find that feedback from peer can be the beneficial
source of feedback to revise their writing so that they will revise their writing based on their peer’s feedback.
1. To what extent do students give peer feedback?
Most of the students could provide feedbacks which were gong into details.The feedback included five areas which were organization area, content
area, language use area, vocabulary area, and mechanic area. Most of them were able to provide suggestions and useful information to their peer about their
compositions. Dealing with the organization area, the students provided suggestion to their peers
to connect their arguments and the evidences in more reasonable way including the introduction and the conclusion of the composition. The feedback on
organization can be seen in students’ answers of question number 1 Is the introduction effective? Explain your answer and number 6 Is the conclusion
effective? Explain your answer, for example: The conclusion is not effective. The government should make a new rule about National Exam, and help the students
48 pass their exam.
By giving suggestion about a conclusion that possible to use, he or she could help his or her peer to make the compositions more coherent than
before. In giving feedback for their peers’ content area, the students commonly
suggested their peers to provide more additional information and evidences to support their peers’ argument or idea. It could be seen in the students’ answer of
question number 2 What is the writer’s main idea?, number 3 Does the writer support that idea with evidence? What is that evidence?, number 4 What
evidence is missing, or incomplete?, number 5 What questions do you have about this composition?, for example: In paragraph 3, maybe you can relate
water resources with drought disaster. For example, the tree’s root absorbs the rain water. The root keeps the water under the land, so it can’t be the cause of
drought. Thus, peer feedback then could help the students to provide more complete details that were relevant to the assigned topic.
Students’ answer of questions number 7 Do you notice any grammar, spelling, and punctuation or word choice errors? revealed that the students could
give peer feedback on language use, vocabulary and mechanic of the compositions. There were a lot of students who committed errors on language
use. Mostly, the students gave feedback in form of correction which dealt with grammar, for example: “…unofficial marriage should be ban because…
Æ ……unofficial marriage should be banned…”. The feedback was clear although in
the questionnaire they confessed that they were afraid to give feedback because of their incapability in grammar.
49 Meanwhile, in giving feedback in vocabulary area, the students commonly
provided feedback by giving suggestion on word choice, for example: But Æ
however. They gave another option of words that were better to use. The last area was mechanic. The students provided correction on capitalization and spelling to
their peers’ composition although there were a few students who committed with mechanical errors, for example: In that story, the writer always writes a little
word huruf kecil as a beginning of sentence. I think it is false. However, not all of the students gave the feedback for their peers
optimally. Some of them only give the feedback in surface level. It could be seen from some examples of feedback. In answering question number 1 Is the
introduction effective? Explain your answer, some students only answered whether the introduction is effective or not without giving any explanation on it.
The other example was the answers of question number 3 Does the writer support that idea with evidence? What is that evidence?. Some students did not
give the example of evidences in their peers’ composition. They did peer feedback activity as an obligation or task which had to be done. In this case, this kind of
peer feedback was not clear. The students could not get feedback in form of additional suggestions for the improvement of their composition.
3. How should peer feedback be implemented in writing class?