Peer-Assessment to Improve Writing Skills in A2 Level Students in a Virtual Classroom

Abstract

At a public higher education institution, evaluating and grading students' written English during online classes has become a challenging task. Nowadays, students have presented negative factors such as limited learners’ proficiency to write their ideas, a lack of prior knowledge of English, learners' reliance on the teacher, limited communication in English usage outside of the classroom, learners' lack of perseverance to improve on writing skills, and others. Writing skills, which are extensively employed to improve second language understanding, help to overcome the barriers to enhance communication. Writing also helps to improve fluency, allows a better knowledge of sentence structures, and gets a better connecting vocabulary learned and grammar words in phrases. Some adult students lack the confidence to write in English during virtual sessions. Students find difficult to develop some learning techniques, which became a significant obstacle in class, these are some of the setbacks that this study tried to face. According to Pianta et al. (2012), “different results have shown that peer feedback and a backup learning environment are instruments which help to student’s learning, getting them the opportunity to intervene in improve measures on their learning” (p.6). In this action research, the primary goal is to increase students' English language ability through peer assessment using the Moodle platform.