Applying Collaborative Dialogue and Patterns of Interaction to Peer Response

experimental settings that collaborative dialogue and peer feedback are effective for the development of writing skills, further investigations in ecologically valid settings should be conducted. Examining peer response, or a feedback practice in writing classrooms where students read and comment on each other’s work, is an interesting context to examine in response to Swain’s call for further research.

SLA studies have coded collaborative dialogue for lexical or grammatical LREs, and have examined the occurrence of correctly resolved LREs, where learners eventually arrive at the correct form. However, students in peer response sessions are usually asked to comment on rhetorical issues of content and idea expression, as L2 writing theorists generally believe that writing instructors should be the ones to correct language errors (Ferris, 2003). It is not as

straightforward with peer response data from a typical L2 writing classroom to codify whether or not instances of collaboration about rhetorical structure have been correctly or incorrectly

resolved. After all, there may be multiple ways to improve cohesion in writing, to give just one example of a rhetorical feature that students might focus on. In addition, students often take their peers’ suggestions and use them to revise in later drafts, such that evidence of resolution of the issue would not be present in the interaction itself. As such, it is necessary to measure learning outcomes of peer response in ways that are more appropriate for writing classrooms. Peer

response studies in second language writing have employed various methods for measuring these learning outcomes, and these studies will be discussed in Chapter Three.

While the concept of LREs as they are understood by collaborative dialogue is not

directly applicable to peer response data, the patterns of interaction framework is a useful tool

for describing the social dynamics of these interactions. As with the SLA studies cited here, in the L2 writing literature, peer response pairs and small groups that work more collaboratively tend to have more positive outcomes in terms of student attitudes and revisions (a finding which will be explained in Chapter Three). However, Ferris suggests that “multifeatured, triangulated projects that simultaneously consider feedback characteristics and outcomes” (p. 85) are needed to further this line of research. Ferris has criticized peer response studies for loosely describing the social interactions that occur there. This study will apply Storch’s coding scheme, which arose from learner-learner data and has been applied successfully in various studies, to help lend

the kind of methodological rigor that Ferris calls for. The identification of patterns of interaction,

and measurements of their revision outcomes, will be discussed in detail in Chapter Five.

3 PEER RESPONSE

The previous chapter described the basic tenets of sociocultural theory, and reviewed how these concepts have been applied in SLA studies examining collaborative tasks. This chapter will describe the existing literature on peer response in second language (L2) writing settings, and will explore how this literature might be enriched by applying some of the SCT- based analytical tools used in SLA research.

Although the fields of L2 writing and SLA have, for the most part, developed separately, Liu and Hansen (2002) note that peer response is supported by SLA theories that tout the

importance of spoken interaction for language development, as well as sociocultural theories that value the role of spoken interaction for the development of cognition. Because learners

participating in peer response sessions are asked to use each other as sources of feedback, this activity has the potential to create collaborative dialogue as defined by the SLA studies reviewed in the previous chapter. Just as students who collaborate with another learner produce and

resolve more LREs, peer response has been shown in some cases to result in improved writing on subsequent drafts (Ferris, 2003).

A separate but related writing concept, the idea of literacy development as a social act, also underlies the pedagogical practice of peer response. In the same way that collaborative dialogue researchers view spoken negotiation for meaning as crucial for language development, second language writing researchers argue that individual cognitive processes can only be understood within the unique context of learning. In an L2 writing setting, the unique context of learning may involve the kinds of spoken negotiations for meaning that occur in a peer response session and lead to the writer’s improvement during later revisions.

Nelson (1993) suggests a bidirectional relationship between context and cognition in a composition classroom (citing Flower, 1990), where cognition and context are dynamic and mutually influential. That is, cognition may be influenced by the context of each learner’s culture and experiences, but cognition is not simply a product of these contextual factors; new cognitive knowledge might shape the individual’s perception of his or her context. She argues that in an ESL composition classroom, this interplay of cognition and context creates a challenge for instructors: creating a classroom where social interactions (context) help students to become better individual writers (cognition).

Peer response has the potential to foster such a connection between context and cognition, or between reader-writer interactions and future individual writing development. Students who successfully participate in peer response are not simply developing their individual

skills as writers; they are developing a social relationship with a peer, one in which writers feel comfortable giving and receiving constructive feedback that is beneficial for their subsequent revisions. Because it mirrors this interplay between context and cognition, peer response is promising for fostering writing development among students.

However, descriptions of social interactions during peer response in the literature have shown that not all groups are successful in establishing a collaborative relationship. In addition, a smaller body of studies suggests that peer response is not always beneficial for the revision process or for longitudinal writing development. Overall, few studies have connected social interactions during peer response to revision outcomes in a way that systematically examines how this complex relationship between cognition and context develops over time. This study aims to extend the existing knowledge about peer response by examining two neglected areas: the potential change over time in pair dynamics during peer response sessions, and the effect that these pair dynamics may have on revision outcomes.

The section that follows will examine the existing literature on peer response. Although investigations have been conducted with both pairs and small groups of three or four students, those that focus on pairs will be reviewed here. This section will attempt to demonstrate the need for a study that more rigorously connects social dynamics during peer response to revision outcomes, considering how these contextual and cognitive dimensions influence each other over the course of a semester-long composition course. It will first review studies can be viewed as primarily focused on the cognitive dimension of peer response, because they consider the

revision outcomes and possible long-term effects of peer response on writing development. Next, studies that primarily examine the contextual dimension of peer response will be reviewed. During peer response, contextual variables include the individual ones like students’ first

language and cultural background and their attitudes toward peer response, as well as interpersonal ones such as the social dynamics of the group.