Attitudinal Evaluation in Written Peer Feedback: An Appraisal Study

This paper aims to reveal textual evaluations in students’ written peer feedback. One English reading and writing course in China was connected with one writing-as-processes course in an American university. During the 10 weeks of the research, 21 out of 24 students from the American university, many of whom were ESL writers, and 20 participants from the university in China, all of whom were EFL writers, read the same article and wrote with the same essay prompt. Students were assigned with one overseas partner (or two partners on rare occasions) for peer feedback and then revised their essay with their decisions about the feedback accordingly. From this peer feedback activity, four corpora consisting of Chinese and American university students’ written comments and responses were established. The Attitude system within the Appraisal framework (Martin and White, Language of evaluation: appraisal in English. Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) developed within the Systemic Functional Linguistics paradigm was adopted as the analytical tool. The study found that while giving feedback, both Chinese and American students exhibited a prevalence of Appreciation items over Affect and Judgement ones; American students employed significantly more positive Affect items than Chinese students did, and Chinese students used more negative Judgement items than American students did. When responding to peers’ written comments, Chinese students foregrounded Judgement values while American students focused more on Appreciation subcategory; Chinese students used significantly more positive Affect items and Judgement items than American students did. We conclude that the nature of writing task, cultural traditions and personal learning experiences are some of the factors contributing to student reviewers’ use of evaluative resources in their written comments.