EFL Arab Learners’ Peer Revision of Writing in a Facebook Group: Contributions to Written Texts and Sense of Online Community

Norizan Razak and Murad Saeed

English Language Teaching, 2015, vol. 8, issue 12, 11

Abstract: This qualitative study investigated peer writing revision among English as foreign language (EFL) Arab students in a Facebook group. Specifically, it aimed to identify the text revisions made by the learners and to determine their contributions to the learners’ written texts and sense of online community outside the college classroom context. Being framed within the situated learning approach (Wenger, 1998), the current study was carried out among 14 EFL Arab university learners from Yemen, Algeria, Tunisia, Syria, Sudan and Egypt. A purposeful sampling was perfomed to achieve a heterogeneous group of EFL learners. A qualitative content analysis of the learners’ written paragraphs (original and revised drafts), online interactional exchanges and responses to the post-revision reflection discussions was employed in this study. The findings showed that addition, substitution, deletion, permutation, consolidation, and distribution were identified as the main revision operations made by the EFL learners. These revisions operations and changes contributed to enhancing learners’ end-products or texts in terms of content, unity and organization, language and mechanics. The learners’ engagement in the online revision activities fostered their sense of online learning community by creating an interactive friendly learning environment, building and nurturing new relationships based on shared interests and developing a sense of belonging.

Date: 2015
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