Peer feedback and Chinese medical students' English academic writing development: a longitudinal intervention study

Area of Science:

• Medical Education
• Language Pedagogy

Background:

• Peer feedback is known to improve academic writing skills.
• Its impact on English as a second language (L2) medical students' academic writing is less understood.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the effectiveness of peer feedback in enhancing the academic writing skills of Chinese L2 medical students.
• To compare a process-oriented approach with traditional product-oriented writing instruction.

Main Methods:

• A longitudinal interventional study over 18 weeks involving 124 Chinese medical students.
• Four parallel classes were divided into an experimental group (peer feedback) and a control group (traditional instruction).
• Writing skills were assessed via pre-test, post-test, and delayed post-test.

Main Results:

• The experimental group showed significant improvements in overall writing scores and all components (task response, coherence, lexical resource, grammar) post-intervention.
• These gains were retained 6 weeks later in a delayed post-test.
• The control group showed minimal improvement in writing skills.

Conclusions:

• Integrating peer feedback into L2 medical English writing instruction effectively enhances students' academic writing skills.
• Process-oriented teaching using peer feedback yields better long-term results than product-oriented methods.
• Findings offer practical implications for L2 writing pedagogy in medical education globally.