ESL student response stances in a peer-review task

Abstract Peer reviews are commonly used in ESL composition classes to enable students to help each other improve their writing. However, little research has been conducted concerning how students actually respond to each other during review sessions and what these responses suggest about their assumptions concerning peer reviews and composition. In this exploratory study, we asked 60 ESL freshman composition students to respond in writing to an essay written the previous semester by another ESL student. We then examined the stances the students took toward the writer of the text, the characteristics of these stances, and what these stances suggest about the students' assumptions concerning written classroom discourse. We discerned three stances in the students' reviews: on “interpretive” stance, in which students imposed their own ideas about the topic onto the text; a “prescriptive” stance, in which students expected the text to follow a prescribed form; and a “collaborative” stance, in which students tried to see the text through the author's eyes. A majority of the students assumed a prescriptive stance, suggesting that they believed that correct form was more important than the communication of meaning. We conclude by discussing how our students' responses to their peers' texts can reflect characteristics of the collaborative stance.