Revision Behaviors in a Peer-Reviewed Multi-Draft Writing Context

EFL writing is a cognitively demanding task and asks the writer to pay attention to a large number of elements involved in producing the text. It is unreasonable for our student writers to deal with the overwhelming cognitive demand of writing effectively with a single attempt. Therefore, revision should be a key component of their writing process. The necessity of revision prompts us to consider the integration of multi-draft writing into our teaching practice since it provides students with more opportunities to shape and refine their texts. Peer review has been also recommended as a helpful pedagogical instrument for them to cope with revision tasks successfully. In line with these theoretical underpinnings, this study examined the impact of these two writing pedagogies on Korean college students’ revising behaviors and the improvement of their text quality in an English composition class in a Korean university. The participants in the study received a training on how to review their peers’ writings and went through multi-draft writing process in which they were asked to revise their writings three times on each topic. The results identified the pattern of their revision behaviors and confirmed the writing quality improvements on the subsequent drafts. Some pedagogical suggestions were also proposed to reap the benefits of multi-draft writing and peer review practices in the classroom.