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Abstract

This article introduces Peer Review Circles (PRC), a classroom task that fully engages learners in the peer review process. The authors had observed their undergraduate students were reluctant to do peer review and even more reluctant to use the comments received. To improve the peer review process, the authors decided to change it into a multi-party oral, opinion gap task. Mimicking literature circles, we put students into teams of three and asked them to follow an expanding sequence of Monologue-Dialogue- Discussion (MDD) to discuss each essay. First, one reviewer gave a brief monologue about the writing, then another reviewer joined in and they had a dialogue about the writing while the writer remained silent. Finally, only after listening to the monologue and dialogue could the writer enter the discussion to ask the reviewers about what was said, get further feedback, or explain themselves more fully. This article first explains how to run a PRC and then justifies doing PRCs by using classroom data that demonstrates how interaction during the MDD sequence refines peer feedback from vague/general to specific/detailed and encourages peer review.

Keywords

Peer review writing instruction L2 writing learning to learn interactive learning

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References

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Engaged and Interactive Peer Review: Introducing Peer Review Circles

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