Investigating relationships among students’ affective, behavioral and cognitive engagement with peer feedback on EFL writing

Abstract

This study adopted a mixed-methods design to examine how feedback givers’/receivers’ affective, behavioral and cognitive engagement with peer feedback were related to each other. One hundred and twenty-four English-major sophomores, purposively sampled based on their English proficiency and willingness to participate, responded to questionnaires administered at the beginning and the end of a 16-week writing course to gauge their engagement with peer feedback. Eight of them participated in stimulated recalls conducted to explore, in depth, the relationships among types of engagement with peer feedback. Analyses of the questionnaire data revealed significant positive and negative correlations of varying strength among different types of engagement for feedback givers and receivers. Analyses of the stimulated recalls yielded further evidence that feedback givers’/receivers’ behavioral, cognitive and affective engagement were interrelated in complex ways. These findings have pedagogical implications for the enhancement of students’ engagement with peer feedback in similar contexts.