Asynchronous Peer Feedback in EFL Writing

Abstract

COVID-19 Pandemic encourages teachers to be more creative in varying the learning strategy in online learning. The research aims to explore deeply about the practice of peer feedback through students’ asynchronous online discussion on Edmodo. By employing observation and open-ended questionnaires of 38 non-English university students as its data collecting technique, qualitative descriptive research is the method of this research. The results of the study showed that firstly, asynchronous peer feedback activity was conducted by following the steps of a scientific approach, which were observing a business letter, questioning about its format and language, finding many sources to answer the questions, and conducting the activity of peer feedback. Secondly, 58% of students responded that asynchronous peer feedback was a challenging activity to do because they were aware of the incompetence of writing a good business letter. Meanwhile, the rest said that this activity was easy to do because they felt that they could revise their peers’ works and assumed that this kind of business was routine to do. Therefore, Asynchronous peer feedback can be implemented in the class where the students have sufficient language ability and confidence to give feedback to others.