This chapter comprises eight parts. The first section is related to the higher education system in Taiwan. The second section concentrates on the rationale justifications for peer response. The third section focuses on the evaluation of peer response implemented in the ESL/EFL writing classrooms. The fourth section discusses some principles for effective peer response. The fifth section is concerned about teacher feedback and the debate over appropriation. The sixth section concentrates on issues related to writer autonomy, and on how students can benefit from self-directed learning.
The seventh section reviews the previous empirical studies of peer response in ESL/EFL environments. Finally, the eighth section summarizes points of this chapter.
Higher Education System in Taiwan
The most significant change in the history of higher education in Taiwan was the revocation of martial law in 1987, giving rise to a rapid expansion of the number of institutions and students in the private sector (Mok, 2002). There were 105 universities and colleges (36 public and 69 private) in 1987 with 429,211 enrolled students in total in higher education (306,424 in the private sector and 122,787 in the public institutions). In March 2008, the Taiwanese system of higher education encompassed 164 degree granting institutions. Among them were 55 public universities and colleges and 109 private ones.
There were 1,326,029 students enrolled in the institutions of higher education. The number of students in the public institutions were 412,035; in private schools, 913,994.
The number of faculty members in the public schools were 19,215; in the private ones,
31,913 (Department of Statistics, 2008). In other words, the number of schools in the private sector has increased from 69 to 109, and the enrolled students have increased from 306,424 to 913,994 in the past 21 years. The increasing ratio is 1.58 times in the number of institutions, and 2.79 times in the number of students respectively. Based on the numbers of faculty members and of students in the public and private institutions in 2008, the ratio of the number of students to teachers can be calculated to be 21.44 in the public sector, and 28.64 in the private sector.
The current higher education system consists of comprehensive universities/
colleges and professional universities/colleges. The functions of the comprehensive institutions include teaching, research, and service (intramural, social, and communal), with an emphasis on research and teaching. As a contrast, the functions of professional institutions focus on vocational and technological education, research, and the
cooperation with business and manufacturing sectors to develop new skills, procedures, and products. Each of these two lines of education has its own educational goals, curriculum, instruction, and student guidance (Lee, 2004).
According to the 2007 Taiwan Yearbook (Government Information Office, 2007), the Taiwan government spent 19.38% of its national budget on education in the 2006 fiscal year. Total educational expenditures for that year were US$ 21 billion, or about 5.76% of the gross domestic product (GDP). Of the total 5.76% GDP, 1.87% was distributed to higher education. The public institutions received 0.77% (US$ 2.8 billion) and the private sector 1.10% (US$ 4.0 billion) educational subvention (Educational statistical indicators, MOE, 2007). In other words, 109 private universities and colleges shared about US$ 4 billion subsidy from the state according to the results of institutional
and academic assessment done by The Higher Education Evaluation and Accreditation Council of Taiwan, an organization sponsored by the Ministry of Education. The educational subsidy the private sector secured from the state was lower than what the public institutions received per student if the numbers of the private and public institutions were taken into consideration.
In addition, most public universities and colleges have been long established and have accumulated many educational resources while about 40% of the private
universities and colleges were opened after 1987 and have not had much chance to increase their educational resources. The rapid expansion of institutions in higher education dilutes the educational resources and consequently lowers the quality of education, especially in the private sector. To make the matter more complicated, the drastic downturn in the birth rate every year will soon make some schools in higher education unable to sustain or continue operating because of a lack of students.
According to the Ministry of Interior Affairs of Taiwan, the number of new babies in 1991 was 308,569, then decreased to 292,724 in 2000, and finally declined to 192,887 in 2006. That is to say, during the past 15 years, the number change is minus 115,682; this change of the birth rate is a negative 37.49% (Chen, 2007). For most private institutions in tertiary education, tuition and miscellaneous fees are the major source of revenue for school operation. Their students are charged higher tuition and fees. For example, the range of tuition and fees in the public sector was from NT$ 41,580 (US$ 1,386) to NT$
58,980 (US$ 1,966) in 2005. As a contrast, students were charged from NT$ 75,820 (US$
2527) to NT$ 110,460 (US$ 3,682) in the private schools (Ministry of Education, 2006).
In other words, students in the private tertiary education sector have to pay about 1.8
times more than students in the public schools. Generally speaking, students go to private colleges because their grades obtained in the joint entrance examination are not good enough for them to go to the public universities.
The rapid expansion of private institutions in higher education is not only the result of the government’s policy to use private sources to establish more universities and colleges to cultivate highly qualified manpower for economic development, but also the reflection of social needs of common citizens. Most parents in Taiwan perceive higher education as a major path for future career development and personal advancement.
Before 1987, high school graduates needed to pass a highly competitive national examination called the Joint University Entrance Examination to be admitted to higher education sectors. With the establishment of more institutions of higher education, students have more choices during a multiple-channel entrance admission process by either completing a recommendation/an exam procedure or applying to the programs and universities they select. Generally, students with outstanding academic performance in schools or winners of competition like International Math Olympics are recommended to enter university without taking the entrance examination.
In response to the impact of the rapid expansion of institutions on higher education provision and the trend of globalization, the Taiwan government revised the University Law in 1994 to give universities and colleges more freedom and flexibility in matters such as university autonomy (personnel management), academic self-determination, authority to enroll students and develop their own curriculum, and more financial autonomy. In other words, the revised University Law “launched an accelerated process of educational liberalization and deregulation” (Yang, 2001, p. 9).
In summary, with too many private universities and colleges established, the dilution of governmental educational resources, the decline in the birth rate, and the downturn of economical growth, the private institutions of higher education in Taiwan will face many challenges soon. They need to make difficult choices among the following situations to survive and develop: to recruit more students with lower academic
performance to maintain school operation, to merge with other schools, to recruit more international students if possible, to get more governmental subsidy (the least feasible solution), to transform their educational objective by increasing some attractive life-long learning programs for adults and retired people, to downsize the school, and/or to
promote their school’s competitiveness and prestige by improving teaching, research, and service quality.
Rationale Justifications for Peer Response
This section consists of five subsections. Each subsection will dwell on one theory that underpins the theoretical framework of peer response. First, the process-writing theory influences the implementation of peer response by emphasizing meaning over form, process over product, and multiple revisions over finished texts in the process of writing. Second, the social-historical theory provides peer response with the concepts of scaffolding and collaboration among peers, as well as the sequence of language
development. Third, the collaborative learning theory argues that knowledge is constructed by learners through active participation in the activities in a learning community in a two-way communication. Fourth, some studies in the field of second language acquisition provide insights on the importance of group work in the acquisition
of second language, especially the ideas of comprehensible input, intake, and output through peer interaction. The last rationale for peer response is the cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT), which can be used to describe the elements of peer response from the perspectives of motivation, goal, and operation as well as the dynamic reciprocal transformation of each element.
Process Writing Theory
The first theoretical foundation of peer response is derived from the process writing theory. In general, the process-oriented writing theory emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s in the L1 writing setting as a response to traditional product-oriented writing and then was adopted in L2 writing as a pedagogical practice. Process approach writing highlights the importance of the process of writing; students are encouraged to engage in
“brainstorming activities, outlining, drafting (focusing on meaning), rewriting (focusing on organization and meaning), and editing (focusing on style and grammar)” (Liu &
Hansen, 2002, p. 3). As a contrast, product approach writing emphasizes the importance of form and the finished text by imitating model essays. Certain factors contributed to the rise of the process approach writing in the composition classrooms. First and foremost, process writing rose in the early 1960s along with the New Education Movement (Connors & Glenn, 1992), which was deeply influenced by Jerome Bruner’s ideas on learning, especially the discovery learning theory. For Bruner, learning was a process of discovering meaning, not simply taking in the ready-made knowledge. It was not enough to teach students facts and techniques; instead, education should engage students in the
process of discovering the how and why of something as it was. He illustrated this point clearly in Toward a Theory of Instruction by saying that
To instruct someone…is not a matter of getting him to commit results to mind.
Rather, it is to teach him to participate in the process that makes possible the establishment of knowledge. We teach a subject not to produce little living libraries on that subject, but rather to get a student to think mathematically for himself, to consider matters as an historian does, to take part in the process of knowledge getting. Knowledge is a process, not a product. (1966, p. 72) Active participation in a collaborative process with personal past/current knowledge and experience to construct knowledge constitutes what is essential for learning. In a process-oriented writing task, peer response, viewed as one of the important instructional methods, supports the writing activity by students’ engagement in constructing texts through
negotiation of meanings, multiple feedback from multiple audiences, and multiple revision and editing.
Next, some researchers dedicated themselves to advocating the process approach to writing in the early 1970s. Janet Emig (1971) argued that in the writing classroom, reflexive (personal) writing, initiated by students, should be used more often than extensive (formal) writing, sponsored by the teacher. Reflexive writing concerns the writers’ feelings and experiences, and prompts more planning, drafting, and revising. In contrast, extensive writing focuses on information to be conveyed to a reader, usually the teacher as the target audience. The influence of Emig’s study lies in its conception of composition as a process and its suggestion that the composing process should be taught and studied. Peter Elbow is another important figure who supports the practice of process
writing. In Writing without Teacher (1973), Elbow proposed an alternative to the
traditional writing approach. Instead of generating thoughts first, mapping an outline next, and starting writing finally as dictated in the traditional approach to composing an essay, he suggested that writing (free writing) in the early draft should be a process to let
thinking flow with little concern about grammatical accuracy, diction, sentence structure, or a thesis since too much attention paid to mechanical matters can stifle thought. Only in the late draft should a writer pay attention to revising and editing diction, grammatical items, sentence structure, and rhetoric. For Elbow, writing is a process of cultivating personal voice. To promote the development of personal voice, writers are advised to work with peers instead of with teachers. The teacher-student relationship is not on an equal status (teachers as evaluators of students’ works), while peer-peer relationship is equal with regard to the roles they play in the peer interaction. Writers can be students as well as teachers and readers as well as reviewers. Even though some researchers criticize his idea of writing without a prior plan since this practice may miss some important points that logically should have been considered in a well-constructed essay (Coomber, 1975), and his idea of free writing as having the tendency to reject skills instruction and the naïve expectation that frequent practice makes good writers (Fox & Suhor, 1986), Elbow’s conception of writing exerts a great influence on the later-on development of peer response in the aspects of multiple drafts and multiple revisions based on multiple feedback from peers, awareness of the presence of audience, and the necessity of an objective attitude in peer exchange of opinions.
Finally, Rohman and Wlecke developed and modified prewriting as a theory of invention and teaching at Michigan State University in the early 1960s (Connors & Glenn,
1992). They argued that prewriting, the initial and important stage of writing, is the stage of discovery in the writing process. Writing should put more weight on invention and the composing process than on creating a finished essay. For Rohman, writing is a process that “shows continuous change in time like growth in organic nature” and “good thinking can produce good writing” and therefore “students must learn the structure of thinking that leads to writing” (1965, pp. 106-107). Pre-writing is one of the elements in the Stage-Model theory—prewriting, writing, and rewriting—that constitutes one strand of the process writing theory. Peer response substantiates the process-writing theory by focusing on brainstorming and multiple revisions.
Social-Historical Theory
The social-historical theory provides a second theoretical foundation for the
implementation of peer response in the ESL/EFL writing class. The major contribution of the social-cultural theory to substantiate the rationale of peer response comes from
Vygotsky’s concept of zone of proximal development (ZPD) and concept of language development. In Mind in Society (1978), Vygotsky defined the concept of ZPD by saying that
it is the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers. (p. 86)
There are two salient points in this concept: guidance and collaboration. In other words, Vygotsky points out the essence of the social interaction between teacher and student as
well as student and student in a school setting. In both types of interactions, teacher and student can serve in the role of guide and collaborator for other students in the learning community.
In the teacher-student interaction, the teacher serves as guide, facilitator, and coach, or sometimes as co-author with students. Generally speaking, the role of the teacher is to provide scaffolding, and not to directly instruct. The student has to construct his/her own meaning and make his/her own textual decisions.
In the ESL/EFL writing class, what a teacher provides to students should not be a kind of “banking system” (Freire’s term, 1998)—the teacher as the dispenser of
knowledge and the students as passive recipients. Instead, the students should actively participate in the process of learning to construct knowledge of writing from their past experiences. The principle for this kind of interaction is that a teacher “give[s] more help when the learners get into difficulty, but offer less help as they gain in proficiency”
(Wood & Wood, 1996, p. 7).
As for the peer/peer interaction, a student can serve as a tutor or a collaborator. This type of interaction is especially helpful in a large multilevel class with heterogeneous-ability students. In some countries, teaching students in a small class is only a dream, impossible to make true. The school's financial budget cannot afford to have more teachers to fill teaching positions. Under this circumstance, requiring a writing teacher to give students detailed feedback is to demand an almost Herculean task. Even if the effort and energy put into the job of feedback are worthwhile, no teacher can handle the amount of paper correction of three classes with fifty students, respectively, each week.
The benefits of peer tutoring and peer collaboration, according to Forman and Cazden (1986), are that, among the students who interact at a cooperative level, a great deal of mutual support, encouragement, correction, and guidance is exchanged. In addition, collaborative problem solving seems to offer some of the same experiences for students that peer tutoring provides: (1) the need to give verbal instructions to peers, (2) the impetus for self-reflection encouraged by a visible audience, and (3) the need to respond to peer questions and challenges (p. 183). But the most important value of peer interaction is that the student takes an active role in schools where the teacher-student interactions are limited and rigid because the roles are irreversible. With their peers, students can reverse interactional roles with the same intellectual content, giving
directions as well as following them, and asking questions as well as answering them (p.
184).
The concept of language development is another contribution of Vygotsky to support the rationale of peer response. The sequence of language development progresses from social speech through egocentric speech to inner speech and finally to written speech (1986). The gist of social speech states that language development is gradually obtained through the communication between learners and more capable peers or adults.
The function of social speech is to convey intended meanings to the other party. After mastery of social speech, a learner will be able to develop egocentric speech, or self-talk.
Self-talk is the transitory stage for a learner to transform (internalize) social speech into inner speech. In short, “[i]nner speech is speech for oneself; external speech is speech for others” (Vygotsky, 1986, p. 225). For most ESL/EFL learners, social interaction is one way to acquire social speech with interlanguage. Social interaction embodies the verve of
peer response activities—negotiating meanings by clarifying the problem, asking and answering questions, confirming, and repairing. It is through the effort of operation and repetition that peers can “create and maintain a shared perspective of the task (i.e., intersubjectivity) and to construct scaffolded help, which enables them to complete their tasks” (DiCamilla & Anton, 1997, p. 609).
In Thought and Language (1986), Vygotsky acutely points out the several
differences between speech and writing. First of all, writing is different from speech in both structure and function. “It is speech in thought and image only, lacking the musical, expressive, intonational qualities of oral speech. In learning to write, the child must disengage himself from the sensory aspect of speech and replace words by images of words” (p.181). It is the abstract quality that prevents learners from mastering the sign system easily. Next, in writing, unlike in speech, there is no actual addressee presented.
Thirdly, speech provides interlocutors with motivation for conversation. “In conversation, every sentence is prompted by a motive. Desire or need leads to request, question to answer, bewilderment to explanation” (Vygotsky, 1986, p.181), whereas writing lacks immediate needs and is more abstract. Fourthly, writing is a task that requires a conscious
Thirdly, speech provides interlocutors with motivation for conversation. “In conversation, every sentence is prompted by a motive. Desire or need leads to request, question to answer, bewilderment to explanation” (Vygotsky, 1986, p.181), whereas writing lacks immediate needs and is more abstract. Fourthly, writing is a task that requires a conscious