Peer and Teacher Feedback in A Foreign Language Research Writing Course:A Case Study of Doctoral Students’Perspectives in Finland

The provision of feedback on student work has been a common and even recommended practice across levels of education throughout the years.In the field of academic writing pedagogy,giving feedback has become a crucial part of the teaching/learning process given that composition skills are quite intricate and difficult to master,requiring a cycle of continual drafting,feedback and re-drafting until a final version is produced.Teacher feedback appears to be the most utilized in current classrooms,with peer feedback beginning to be applied in many disciplines as well in recent times.Nevertheless,it appears that most research studies on the uses and the benefits of teacher and peer feedback focus on undergraduate students with graduate students’voices less contemplated in this regard.Considering this potential research gap as well as the fact that doctoral students are often more skilled and competent writers,this study analyses these students’attitudes and views toward the need of teacher and peer feedback in a research writing in English course delivered in a Finnish university with a mix of international and local students.The results seem to indicate that both types of feedback,but specifically a combination of both,were well-accepted and highly-regarded by these students,particularly as far as reader-friendliness is concerned.

THE PROCESS-ORIENTED APPROACH TO ESL/EFL WRITING INSTRUCTION AND RESEARCH

The process movement is originally a reform effort in improving teaching composition to native English speaking students. It advocates an approach to composition teaching that emphasizes students' writing process rather than the product. Assuming that the ESL/EFL writing process is similar to that of the first language, early ESL process enthusiasts borrowed methods and techniques from the English composition class to be used in an ESL writing class that allow students ample time and freedom to write in the real sense. The process-oriented approach has also initiated a research effort in investigating the nature of ESL writing. Though still remaining the mainstream approach to ESL writing, the process approach does not provide solutions to all the issues in developing students' writing competence. However a systematic study of the process approach can throw light on our understanding of writing and help us seek a better and more balanced approach to teaching writing.

Appraisal of the Production-Oriented Approach： An Introduction

The production-oriented approach （POA） has been developed over a decade. It is driven by the need to improve English classroom instruction for university students in China （Wen, 2016）. It is also motivated by the aspiration to enhance the quality of foreign language education in other similar pedagogical contexts outside China. A volume of research has been done by Wen Qiufang and her research team, to formulate the theory of POA and to test its effectiveness in classroom pedagogy （e.g. Wen, 2016, 2015; Yang, 2015; Zhang, 2015）. At the moment, the POA is still at an early stage of theory building and almost all empirical research is done in the Chinese context. In order to improve the quality of this theory and to make it intelligible to the international academic community, a one-day symposium was held in Beijing Foreign Studies University on May 15, 2017. The symposium was entitled ＇The first international forum on innovative foreign language education in China： Appraisal of the POA＇. In the forum, leading experts in applied linguistics were invited to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the POA and the directions for its future development. The symposium was the first attempt for the POA research team to discuss its latest work with international scholars. This Viewpoint section collects the responses of four experts who participated in the symposium, listed in alphabetical order. The collection of articles covers three topics related to the POA： its pedagogical application, its use for teacher training, and its research. Alister Cumming is Professor Emeritus and the former Head of the Centre for Educational Research on Languages and Literacies, University of Toronto, Canada. His article focuses primarily on POA research as an exemplary case of design-based research. Rod Ellis is Research Professor in the School of Education at Curtin University, Australia. He discusses POA in terms of pedagogy, teacher training and research, with both critiques and constructive suggestions. Paul Kei Matsuda is Professor of English and Director of Second Language Writing at Arizona State University, the writed states. He responds to POA from the perspective of an expert researcher and teacher of L2 writing. Charlene Polio is Professor and Associate Chair in the Department of Linguistics ＆ Germanic, Slavic, Asian ＆ African Languages atMichigan State University, the writed states. She conceptualises POA as a useful method to address some issues in pre-service teacher development. Overall, the articles in this section are insightful and reader-friendly. They are not only useful for the development of POA in particular, but may also be valuable to a broad range of researchers as they touch upon pertaining issues, as well as emerging topics, in the field of applied linguistics. We therefore find it necessary to make them accessible to a wide readership.