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The Impact of Peer Feedback on Students’ Oral Production

Abstract:

Developing speaking skills in a second language is influenced by many factors. As Brown (2000) mentioned, one of these factors that can negatively impact this skill is the affective factor. Most students feel anxious whenever they have to speak because they fear blurting out something wrong or incomprehensible. It is one of the difficulties identified in eighth-grade students aged twelve; it is difficult for them to maintain a conversation and express and support their ideas in spoken English. These eighth-grade students have gone through two years of online education where they have not had the chance to practice their speaking skills with peers and have focused on content. Therefore, they cannot maintain a conversation or share their opinions using English. They are now back in their physical classrooms. After a month of review, the school system has focused on evaluations through lessons, homework, individual activities, and group activities without any feedback to help them improve. Consequently, this research proposes introducing peer feedback into educational practice to improve students’ oral production. Peer feedback is when “learners work together and comment on one another’s work or performance and provide feedback on strengths, weaknesses and suggestions for improvement” (Yu & Hu, 2017, as cited in Banister, 2020, p. 2). In the hope that it can help engage students in their learning and positively impact their speaking skills, which is one of the most challenging skills for most students learning a foreign language because of the factors mentioned at the beginning. Therefore, this paper aims to answer whether peer feedback impacts students’ oral production. For that reason, the research question that guides this study is: 1) To what extent does peer feedback improve eighth-grade students’ oral production?.