The role of teacher and peer feedback in shaping student writing revisions: a complementary feedback model

This study compared feedback from teachers and trained peers on how EFL students revised their work in an undergraduate writing course. Two intact classes of second-year English majors, at a university in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, received either teacher feedback (n = 38) or peer feedback (n = 39) over three drafting cycles. Revisions were categorized as feedback-based, partly feedback-based, or independent, and interviews with 20 students examined their decisions regarding uptake. The results indicate that teacher feedback resulted in a higher percentage of feedback-based uptake, while trained peer feedback facilitated greater revision autonomy, as evidenced by an increase in partly feedback-based and independent revisions. Interview results show that students' decisions about whether to take comments into account depended on how credible, clear, and useful they perceived them to be. Peer review made students think about their own work and keep an eye on it, but it also made them more likely to ignore suggestions that were wrong or unclear. Drawing on these findings, the study proposes a complementary feedback model in which peer feedback and teacher feedback serve distinct but mutually reinforcing functions: peer feedback fosters revision autonomy, evaluative judgment, and self-initiated engagement, while teacher feedback provides expert calibration for accuracy, structural precision, and the resolution of meaning-level concerns that peer review does not address.