Opinion of the reviewers on peer feedback article
26-Feb-2015
Thank you very much for your helpful review of Manuscript ID ELTJ-2015-ART-0018 entitled "Can learners with high English proficiency learn from peer feedback?".
I have now been able to look at this article in the light of all the feedback received and have contacted the author with a decision of Reject.
I thought you might be interested to see the "raw" comments from the reviewers. Please note that I may have edited these before sending them to the author.
With very best wishes
Graham Hall
ELT Journal
Reviewer: 1
Comments to the Author
It seems to be a fairly obvious point that LP students will benefit more than HP students from peer feedback. The paper justifies itself as ‘filling a research gap’ as there is not much research to investigate the opposite case. Could it be that the opposite case has (while perhaps not overtly) been looked at in papers that investigate whether or not there can be benefits through peer feedback per se, but which have found that the benefits are mostly for the LP learners (and which have therefore not discussed at length the implications for HP learners?) Perhaps needs a bit of explanation or clarity as to why it is necessary (or a good idea) to see if HP learners can learn from LP learners; our intuitions say that yes, in some instances this may be the case, but clearly it is not something you would like to bank on.
You also need to explain (although you give the learning context for the class) why there is quite such a range of diversity in the same class. If this is just because ‘that’s the way it is’, then maybe this needs further elucidation for those readers who are not so familiar with the context.
While peer feedback training was given, was that seen as effective? ‘Tam’ later questions the skills of the the feedback givers. Felix also (p5 ll36-41) questions the validity of the feedback received, and its appropriacy for the particular learning context; he may have a point.
p3, l8: You might need to explain ‘meaningful units’
Some of the comments from reviewers seem non-committal, or ‘empty’, in the sense that they make some rather obvious points (e.g. write an introductory sentence), these being the sorts of de-contextualised advice that textbooks or classroom presentations might make.
Tam, again, later makes the point that the process of reviewing in itself can be helpful, and perhaps this is the case; maybe it may be more so than the peer-triggered revisions (which, considering the example on p4, ll52-57, may leave something to be desired.)
In a way, it seems to me that there is simply too much going on here. You have decided to investigate whether or not HP learners can learn, through peer feedback, from LP learners, and found that in certain instances it may be helpful, but generally there is not enough information to tell. You have filmed, transcribed, categorised peer-responses and peer-triggered revisions, trained and interviewed participants in order to find out not very much. That is fine, not all research leads to ground-breaking insights and discoveries, but what you have, is not very clearly presented or well-argued; I do not agree that the study has pedagogical implications of any importance or insight, and I do not agree that it illustrates clearly ‘whether, what or how’ HP learners can benefit from peer-feedback, apart from what was already known, or what intuition tells us.
Perhaps a simpler research approach would be to concentrate on meaningful HPHP peer feedback, and the types of comments that elicit particular responses, leading to better marks.
Occasional edits: p1 l44: repetition of ‘peer feedback’
p2 l13: ‘study’ appears twice
p2 l46: Don’t call them ‘a female’ and ‘males’.
p6 ll56-57… too many instances of ‘feedback’
Reviewer: 2
Comments to the Author
I hesitate to reject this submission because, based on the authors' description of their research method, it would seem they have plenty of rich data on which to draw. In addition, I do see value in investigating the extent to which heterogeneous pairing/grouping in the peer feedback process -- and to some extent, this paper makes a contribution in that area. However, the main issue with the paper can be traced to, especially, RQ1. Unfortunately, there is relatively little that can be gleaned from the data presented from Helen, Tam, and Felix. What analysis is presented does not support the authors' assertion that "this study illustrates whether, what, and how HP students can learn..." In fact, we know very little about the whether, what, and how by the end of the paper. Felix's data might have been the most interesting (potentially), but then we do not know to what extent Felix's reaction is just Felix being Felix.
I am compelled to reject this submission, but can recommend that the authors submit a different manuscript, somehow making better use of the data they have admirably gathered. For example, it might be more interesting to the ELT-J readership to not have a broad-stroked qualitative analysis of how many comments each participant received, and the categorization of those, but instead know more about the nature of the comments themselves, e.g. a semantic description of the kind of comments that seemed more likely to result in uptake by the reviser. That's just one suggestion. The main point, I suppose, is that the authors seemed to want to be able to make generalizations regarding HP students when such generalizations are rendered invalid due to the potential "noise" in the data caused by such a small sample. Instead of attempting to answer the "what, whether, and how" (questions essentially not answerable with the authors' current research design), I would narrow it down to more on the "how".
Also, any subsequent submission (again, of a different manuscript) must also include more about the people who were giving the peer feedback (i.e. the peers). It seemed ironic to me that a paper on peer feedback was so unilateral in its description. Surely there is an intersubjectivity involved in that dynamic, and that, too, might be able to be captured and described better in a different paper using the same data.
I wish the authors luck on a future submission.