The current paper reports an empirical study of asynchronous online group review of argumentative essays among nine English as foreign language (EFL) Arab university learners joining English in their first, second, and third years at the institution. In investigating online interactions, commenting patterns, and how the students facilitate text revisions, a three-level analysis of learners’ comments in terms of the language functions, nature and focus area, and connections to subsequent text revisions was conducted. The learners produced a number of 1792 comments which were exploratory, including scaffolding and non-scaffolding (72%), procedural (11%), and social (17%) comments. In relation to the nature and focus area, 53% of the exploratory comments were revision-oriented comments—focusing on global (n = 799; 84%) and local (n = 149; 16%) issues of learners’ essays—whereas non-revision-oriented comments (47%) focused on learners’ socio-relational space (74%), task management (23%) and technical challenges (3%). The findings also showed that 46% of the overall global (n = 615) and only 10% of the overall local (n = 838) text revisions were connected to learners’ comments, indicating the value of global oriented comments in facilitating learners’ global text revisions. Differences of occurrence of these commenting patterns among the three groups were found. Such findings suggest that global text revisions need to be modelled by instructors.
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Previous issue date: 2017-06-01
endingpage:
226
identifier.citation:
Saeed, M. A., & Ghazali, K. (2017). Asynchronous group review of EFL writing: Interactions and text revisions. Language Learning & Technology, 21(2), 200–226. https://dx.doi.org/10125/44618
identifier.issn:
1094-3501 1094-3501
identifier.uri:
http://hdl.handle.net/10125/44618
number:
2
publicationname:
Language Learning & Technology
publisher:
University of Hawaii National Foreign Language Resource Center Michigan State University Center for Language Education and Research
site_url:
/item/10125-44618/
startingpage:
200
subject:
Asynchronous Group Review Interactions Text Revisions EFL Learners
title:
Asynchronous group review of EFL writing: Interactions and text revisions