On 18 November at 16:15 Roger M. A. Yallop will defend his doctoral thesis “The affect and effect of asynchronous written artefacts (cover letters, drafts, and feedback letters) within L2 English doctorate writing groups” (“Mustandid, kaaskirjad ja vastastikune kirjalik tagasiside inglise keelt teise keelena kasutavate doktorantide kirjutamisrühmades”) (in General Linguistics).
Supervisors:
Professor Renate Pajusalu, University of Tartu
PhD Djuddah Leijen, University of Tartu
Opponent:
Professor Susan M. Lang, The Ohio State University (USA)
Summary
The peer feedback process is known to help students improve their writing skills (e.g. Aitchison 2010). This dissertation examines how the written peer feedback process can be optimised to support the long-term writing skills of PhD students. The students are placed in small writing groups where they are taught to support each other in drafting a research article for scientific publication. Within their groups, the PhD students periodically give, and receive from each other, written feedback comments on sections of their draft articles. To help generate useful feedback comments, each PhD student writes a 'cover letter' to explain how their submitted draft should be assessed. Thus, the students give their feedback comments based on the author’s draft and cover letter. The authors then decide how to implement their reviewers' written feedback comments to improve their subsequent drafts. Obtaining a better understanding of what constitutes good cover letters and good feedback comments (i.e. 'good feedback practices') will help researchers devise better pedagogies to support the writing practices of writing groups. Thus, this dissertation has two main aims. Firstly, good written feedback practices are determined through the quantitative and qualitative analysis of the PhD students' cover letters and feedback comments. Secondly, a model of the written peer feedback process ('AWFP model') is induced from the secondary analysis of the data. Thus, the writing pedagogical framework (i.e. the AWPF model used in tandem with good feedback practices) developed in this dissertation can be utilised by educators and researchers to improve upon current writing pedagogy.
Access to the defence:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86259516219?pwd=OEpxWGZSSXVxV3hJZVVSVHdNTmN5QT09
Meeting ID: 862 5951 6219
Passcode: 918603