The Effects of Online Feedback Training on Students’ Text Revision

Yu-Fen Yang, National Yunlin University of Science and Technology Wen-Ting Meng, National Yunlin University of Science and Technology Oftentimes, college students who learn English as a Foreign Language (EFL) provide their peers with incorrect and misleading feedback during text revision. To improve the effectiveness of peer feedback, this study examined the degree to which online feedback training impacted EFL college students’ text revisions. A sample of 50 college students was grouped into the moreand less-proficient groups with 25 students in each. Results of this study reveal that the less-proficient students improved more during text revision than the more-proficient students did after the online feedback training on error correction. They were better able to detect and correct both local errors (i.e., grammatical) and global errors (i.e., text development, organization, and style) in their own and peers’ texts. Their texts improved as a result of receiving immediate feedback and having the opportunity to explicitly observe how their more-proficient peers provided corrections and useful suggestions to peers and clarified writing problems for text improvement. The moreproficient students did not trust their peers’ suggestions as much and made corrections mainly on local errors. These EFL college students’ perceptions toward the effects of online feedback training on text revision were elaborated in this study.