Peer review activity and a search‐engine based corpus system

Abstract

For the past two decades, we have witnessed a number of peer review research studies in both first and second/foreign language writing classrooms. Few studies, however, have been done to build a custom search‐engine based corpus system that performs searches on relevant texts for academic writing tasks, such as peer review activity. The study investigates students’ perception of the peer feedback task using a search‐engine based corpus system called Word Engine. The participants were 322 first‐year undergraduates across disciplines who took an academic writing course at a large public university in Singapore. Data were collected from background questionnaires about the participants, peer reviews on first drafts of the students’ papers, and students’ final papers after incorporating feedback from the peer review. Findings showed that students believed that peer feedback activity was useful. They made revisions on various aspects including discussion of results, the development of ideas, macro‐rhetorical goal of the paper, and the use of academic language such as hedges. Students used Word Engine because it excluded all nonacademic websites. The study contributes to the field of academic writing and corpus linguistics, particularly how peer feedback with the use of Word Engine can promote student autonomy in learning.