Feedback discourse in Indonesian project-based learning: language use in student self‑ and peer‑assessment

This study investigates how Indonesian undergraduate students express evaluative meaning in self- and peer-assessment comments within a project-based learning context. Drawing on frameworks of feedback literacy, pragmatic competence, and intercultural pragmatics, the research analyzes over 4,000 comments written in Bahasa Indonesia by first-year engineering students. The study examines how students align written feedback with rubric-based scores, express their sentiments, perform speech acts, and position themselves to peer expectations and sociocultural norms. Using a mixed-methods approach, the analysis combines sentiment classification, speech act coding, and estimation accuracy to examine linguistic strategies across gender and performance levels. Findings reveal that most comments were brief, vague, or descriptive and showed limited alignment with rubric criteria. Students tended to use justification rather than critique or suggestion, and affective tone was overwhelmingly neutral. Female students showed greater alignment and rubric awareness, whereas male students showed greater variability in tone and estimation behaviour. Underestimators often used hedging or self-effacing language; overestimators favoured assertive but unsupported claims. These patterns suggest that students’ feedback is shaped not only by cognitive understanding but also by discourse norms, unfamiliarity with genre, and politeness strategies.