The Role of Peer and Tutor Feedback

I was reluctant to bid for this module since last semester. I have never enjoyed English lessons in the past, because they made me belittle my own abilities. As such, I imagined ES1102 as another dreadful English module that would significantly reflect my inadequacy in the English language.

However, now that I am approaching the end of the semester, I am really glad that I took ES1102. Although I still commit expression errors and write grammatically incorrect sentences from time to time, I am now confident to say that I can write better as compared to the past. I have learnt so much more from Brad about using the correct form of English, and the encouragements he gave us have certainly spurred us to continue to improve. One of the many ways we utilised to improve ourselves would be though the use of peer and tutor feedbacks.

This exercise requires us to provide constructive feedbacks to our peers on areas regarding their content and language. Sometimes, we have to work together with our peers to evaluate on a particular classmate’s essay.

Peer evaluation has forced me to think critically and has also made me put in more effort in trying to understand how my peers convey their ideas though writing. It gave me the opportunity to reflect on the areas I am lacking and also allowed me to learn from my classmates on how they managed to pen down their thoughts more effectively. Giving feedbacks made me more aware of my own inadequacy and to avoid making grammar mistakes, I started to become more careful when I write. Feedbacks from my classmates reminded me of the many little mistakes I made throughout my write-ups and as a result, I became more mindful to avoid making the same mistakes again.

However, I feel that the only disadvantage of peer evaluation is that most of us are not confident with our own language skills. We were not absolutely certain on areas like expression and grammar and thus we were unable to provide constructive feedbacks for our classmates to improve on. Peer evaluation serves to only help me on improving the content for my essays since all of us are lacking in the ability to correct our peers grammatically. This is apparent for my essay draft 2. Most of my classmates gave me favourable comments and thus I thought my essay was clear. However, Brad told me that my thesis statement was too vague and I need to reorganise my content to make my essay flow. As such, although peer evaluation can certainly be helpful, I felt that it is only helpful to a certain extent.

I know I should not solely depend on peer evaluation if I want to continue to improve. I want to put in more attention when I read other people’s essays in future so that I can learn from the way they write, and also continue to proof read my essays to make sure they are coherent and organised. If possible, I would like to ask my friends to help me out when they are free. I hope to cultivate this passion for reading so that I will continue to read and learn more new things that will not only improve my vocabularies and the way I write, but also open up my perspective of the world. Eventually, I want to strive towards writing error free essays in future.

I am really thankful for this module, because I met a really helpful and encouraging teacher, and also managed to work with a group of fun and amazing classmates. I am more fundamentally aware of why certain mistakes should not be made, and now I am not just correcting myself according to what my teachers want. The module has benefitted me in many ways and although it can be time consuming, I believe my time was well spent.