Peer-Assessment Influence on EFL Writing Skills

Abstract

One of the main challenges of mastering English as L2 is writing, which is the case of participants of this study. This research was developed to improve the participants' English language writing through the application of peer-assessment. Writing is one of the four skills of L2 and it is required that students use a correct grammatical structure when writing a text, and essay, among others. Mastery of writing in L2 allows personal and professional development that will serve as motivation factors for success. Students experience difficulties when writing in L2 due to the use of vocabulary, grammatical structures and connectors, among other aspects of writing. In written production, each student has previous experience, which is why for some students it is easy to create a text, while for others it can probably be very difficult. This was evident in the participants when they were doing their activities. Due to the information obtained about the writing difficulties presented by the participants of this study, writing being part of the problem for the acquisition of an L2, this research has been designed to improve this skill by applying different peer-assessment tasks proposed in the research. The activities encourage creativity in participants as well as the acquisition of vocabulary and grammatical structure. This approach aims to develop a set of activities applied to writing skills that allow participants to work as a team, provide feedback and convey their thoughts and ideas through the use of peer-assessment. Therefore, this research focuses on proposing peer-assessment to improve students' writing.