Improving Writing Using Peer Assessment through WhatsApp

Abstract

Writing makes it possible to connect thinking with the content learned (Alharbi, 2015). When students write, they become creative because they have to write their ideas and associate them to produce a text with new meaning (Klein, 1999, as cited in Alharbi, 2015). More than creativity, writing activities improve students’ comprehension (Bangert-Drowns et al., 2004; Rivard, 1994; Wiley & Voss, 1999, as cited in Alharbi, 2015), because students write after reading, this facilitates a better understanding of a reading text. Writing is considered a productive skill; it implies the appropriate use of vocabulary and grammar (Sholihah & Setyandari, 2019) and requires practice to obtain high levels. Mastering writing is difficult for the learners of English as a Foreign Language (EFL), and it is challenging to improve students’ writing skills (Umme, 2015). Learning English in a country without using that foreign language makes it even harder to develop this skill (Umme, 2015). These two aspects affect learners if they are not modified adequately and timely during the process by the teacher. The most common difficulty is that learners translate their ideas from their native language into the target language (Ellis, 1997, as cited in Pimpisa & Normah, 2015). Likewise, Ecuadorian EFL teachers mostly use books and texts focused on grammar and vocabulary, but poor activities focus on productive speaking and writing skills (Alvarez & Guevara, 2021). Among the difficulties that EFL students find in writing descriptive essays is the confusion they have when identifying the schematic structure of the text and the lack of linguistic features that make them make a lot of mistakes (Siahaan, 2013). In the same vein, Farooq et al. (2020) pointed out the lack of vocabulary, L1 interference, poor grammatical structure, and por spelling as other difficulties that EFL learners have when writing texts. In terms of collaboration, some students’ challenges are the unfamiliarity with peer collaboration, unequal proficiency in communication among partners, and the lack of clear instructions regarding the steps to be followed (Bhowmik et al., 2019).