the differential effect of peer and teacher corrective feedback on the writing fluency of efl learners

Peer feedback is a common characteristic of second language (l2) writing instruction. yet, whether it is facilitative of l2 writing development is open to debate. the present study has made an attempt to investigate the potential impact of peer and teacher corrective feedback on learners’ writing fluency. the participants of the study, chosen through convenience sampling, were 45 upper-intermediate efl learners who were studying top notch 2b at jahad institute. they were divided into three groups which were peer corrective feedback group, teacher corrective feedback group, and control group. the treatment involved three phases (bouchefra, 2015) and took five weeks. phase one saw students getting engaged in the writing activity, mainly prewriting and drafting. in the second phase, the students finished their draft out of the classroom and last phase included the peers or teachers providing feedback on the drafts based on the six traits criteria. for data collection, the students sat for a toefl writing test and the gathered writing samples were rated in terms of fluency. the researcher divided the number of t-units to the limited time that was 30 minutes for each paper. the data were fed into spss software and non-parametric kruskal-wallis test was run. the findings revealed a significant difference between the experimental groups and the control group. furthermore, the group that received teacher corrective feedback apparently outperformed the peer feedback group. this difference, however, was not statistically significant. the results highlight the importance of providing corrective feedback in l2 writing instruction regardless of it being elicited from teachers or students themselves. finally, the implications of the study are discussed for l2 writing classes, language teachers and learners.