English 895: Blog 4

I totally forgot to post this before class today, but here it is:

Flynn, Elizabeth A.  “Re-Viewing Peer Review.” The Writing Instructor.  Dec.

      (2011). Web. 4 June 2012. <http://www.writinginstructor.com/30review>

Flynn reviews much of the recent scholarship on peer-reviews in writing instruction and argues that the context in which peer review happens makes all the difference to why it is used, who participates in it, and how it is conducted, and she focuses on the contexts of peer-review with ESL students and teaching writing with technology.  She also points out that the purposes of peer review vary greatly, and certain situations lead to more complex peer-review tasks with higher stakes.

Flynn begins by summarizing a paper she published on peer-review back in 1984 in which she argued that peer-reviewers too often gave little useful feedback and failed to recognize incoherent essays.  She then goes on to review some recent research on peer review in detail, categorizing published articles and making note of specific scholars and what they have added to peer-review research.  Some research by Dana Ferris on using peer-review with ESL students suggests that in some cases it is believed to possibly cause more harm than good because of “students’ range of cultural norms and expectations.”  Some of the other interesting but not surprising findings from the range of scholars who have critiqued peer-review include that students have a hard time correcting grammatical errors, many students reported not benefitting from peer feedback, student perceptions of an essay’s grade did not match well with instructor grades, and providing students with models of effective essays often improves student writing better than peer feedback. 

Some of the benefits of peer-reviewing that she encounters in the scholarship are that peer-reviewing helps create a sense of community in the course, and students benefit from both receiving feedback and reviewing the writing of others.  In a review of scholarship by Osama Sayad on computer-mediated peer review, she found that online peer-review can provide a “safer and more relaxed environment for language learners,” and that anonymous peer review showed even more benefits on both writing performance and the quality of critical peer feedback when compared to other identifiable peer reviews (especially in reserved cultures).  Flynn also reviews other work on peer review that asserts some of the benefits of face-to-face peer review: feedback in person allows students to ask questions and provide further explanations for their comments.  Work by Formo and Robinson suggests that online peer review groups are effective at establishing “writing communities dedicated to useful response.”  At the end of her essay, Flynn argues that she stands by her earlier assertion that “without training, students may not be able to provide useful feedback,” and she sees potential and also challenges ahead for computer-mediated peer review scholarship.

Because I plan to focus some of my pedagogy project and conference paper on online peer-review in a hybrid course, this article is very useful to me for its review of literature on the subject.  Anyone interested in scholarship on peer review in writing instruction—especially online peer review and using peer review with ESL students—would also find this article very useful.  My only criticism with Flynn’s article is that it is weak on argumentation.  Even though she asserts an argument early on, by the end of the article, I felt like it was just a literature review without much original argument or scholarship.  But since this is right on my topic, that’s okay with me.